The new town where Dr. Wife and I reside is about twenty minutes from the border between North and South Carolina. When I go up to visit her at her little apartment in North Carolina (she’s living there during the weeks as she finishes up her medical residency), I drive through some tiny South Carolina border towns, places with names like “Tatum” and “McColl.” The comparatively larger Laurinburg is on the North Carolina side of the border.
These little towns have some interesting features. On the South Carolina side of the border, they’re tiny. Tatum is a few ramshackle buildings and a local manufacturer; I’m not sure there’s even a gas station there. McColl has a bit more going on, but not much. This section of northeastern South Carolina is very rural, and lies far enough from major Interstates and other population centers that they’re not receiving much beyond commuter traffic, which usually flows out of these communities.
There’s also the people that want to buy fireworks. On the South Carolina side, there are more and more fireworks stands the closet one gets to the State line. Even though we’re still two months away from Independence Day, I will see multiple cars parked at these places when I drive by, so there is apparently an appetite for colorful explosives year-round.
Fireworks are apparently lucrative. On the outskirts of McColl, the last town before hitting the North Carolina border, there is a little floral shop. It’s cute and sports a faded but fun shade of pink. On its sign, it advertises flowers—and fireworks.
As one drives closer to the North Carolina border, there are a number of dilapidated—or even entirely missing—video arcades. I have vague childhood recollections of driving past similar places along the SC-NC border and getting excited that there were video game establishments, but my parents explained they were not arcades like we knew from the mall, but places where people played video poker. One of these establishments has a garish onion dome a la the Kremlin or the Taj Mahal. It is completely vacant.
Video poker was legal in South Carolina at some point in the 1990s. The convenience store next to my late maternal grandfather’s furniture store in Bath, South Carolina had a video poker cabinet (it may have been blackjack), and I remember thinking it was insane that it cost a whopping two dollars to play. Of course, it was likely illegal for me to play it; even if it weren’t, it was too expensive.
Remember, these were the days when most arcade games cost a quarter to play. A good game—something really premium—cost fifty cents. A really awesome, cutting-edge game at, say, Myrtle Beach might cost a dollar. Two bucks to play a hand of poker or blackjack was outrageous (and not very appealing to a kid, anyway), but I imagine many a workman blew his pay packet at these machines every Friday night hoping to escape their situations (yes, there were desperately poor people in the 1990s).
I briefly (and unfortunately) dated the daughter of one of the guys who invented the video poker machine; he became a drug addict, which is tragic but, like most tragedies, also poetic. She was a hot mess (emphasis on the mess, not the hot), and was emblematic of what I call “nouveau riche rednecks.” They’re a type that jump from poverty to wealth too quickly, retaining a great deal of the trashiness associated with riotous country folk. Imagine the people who spend all their money on four-wheelers and jet skis and $80,000 pickup trucks.
To be clear, I’m just two generations removed from poverty on my father’s side. But my paternal grandfather and grandmother weren’t that kind of “country” Southerner that seem to be either the best or worst of people. They were something else, due in large part to their devotion to Christ. Yes, my Papa worked in the textile mill and Mama was a custodian at the library. When I was a little kid, and Papa was retired, I thought he was a scrap dealer: he would drive around in his awesome 1980s Honda Civic hatchback and pick up items people had tossed on the side of the road, then host a huge yard sale every fall. Papa would boast about how the Save-a-Lot brand canned spaghetti and meatballs had one more meatball per can than Chef Boyardee; it struck me as the wisest thing I’d ever heard.
But I digress. The point is that we slowly emerged from that milieu. We did not succumb to the video poker bubble; indeed, I imagine my parents and grandparents were glad to see it go. Governor David Beasley famously lost his re-election bid in the 1998 South Carolina gubernatorial race to Democrat Jim Hodges in large part because Beasley opposed video poker and a State lottery. It was an object lesson in how the people will clamor for their own destruction, which is itself proof that they shouldn’t be allowed to gamble.
Well, they can’t get their video poker fix in South Carolina, but crossing the border into North Carolina’s Scotland County immediately presents visitors with multiple cinderblock boxes with neon signs shouting “777” and “Skill Games.” These hastily-constructed hotboxes host video and other forms of gambling. South Carolinians itching to risk their paycheck on a pipedream can easily hop the border, just as North Carolinians eager to explode LEGO men in their backyard with bottle rockets and Roman Candles can scuttle on down to South Carolina.
There’s something about that liminal space (to use a favorite buzzword of Internet essayists everywhere) in border regions that brings out the unsavoriness of human nature. In a zone where legal and cultural and political identities melt into one another, unimagined possibilities gain life. There are always merchants of vice willing to imagine those possibilities for their desperate customers—for a price.
At least in South Carolina the vice we sell is fireworks, which are more of a fun novelty than a depraved invitation to dark deeds. I’d rather light up the sky with explosives than descend into the darkness of a vape-filled, cinderblocked gambling dungeon.