Checking Out by Tim Peeler (Hub City Press, Spartanburg, SC,  2010, 90 pages)

Checking Out by Tim Peeler is a book of poems about the poet’s years as a motel clerk in Hickory, North Carolina in a time when jobs were scarce and gender roles less fluid.  Peeler no longer works as a motel clerk, the only job he could get at the time, but the memories are there—fodder for poems, triggered by local landmarks. Peeler’s keen eye for detail and understated wit make for delightfully accessible poems.  A very masculine book, Checking Out chronicles those experiences.  And my, but Tim Peeler can turn a phrase.  The book has a story line but no plot unless one considers being a motel clerk and then getting a different job a plot.

Checking Out is divided in to sections:  “Prelude,” “Place,” “Registry,” “Chaos,” “Swimming,” “Clerks,” “The Old Clerk,” and “Aftermath.”  Poems are numbered consecutively throughout the book, beginning with “Place,” but are untitled with the exception of poem IX (“Before”) and the book’s final poem, (poem LI), “I Say it Like a Prayer.”

How can a book begin “Along the spina bifida backbone creek,” wander through the place it all began, “[where] the barefoot child,/ shirtless…/ recites/ the 23rd Psalm [to the chickens],/ [continue] through/ the maples beyond the meadow/ where he’s seen angels” (Prelude, p.1), and fail to impress?  How could a reader see this boy as “he follows the moonlit railroad tracks/… [lives through] the silence of the night-neutered dorm/… [watch him—as, in the house’s one mirror—] he watches himself think about baseball,/ hammering an apple with a hoe handle” and put this book down?  The “red headed boy.” “Big Brother [at] twelve.”  “The blond boy.”  Even the one “hair dulled/ to brown, clasped back to/ pony tail between the shoulders (Prelude, pp. 2-3) ” invites a reader to go on.

As expected, the section on place gives us the setting.  “Nothing is old or sad,/ or pure…” (I, p.9) about motels, restaurants, and drive-in theaters, like the one where, “in the old days/ they hired a young Indian/ to pick up the condoms/ from the gravel bumps.” (IV, p.11)  At this point, the book is only getting started.

Then in “Registry,” Peeler begins to name names from the many characters who, like “Poovey [, found himself] holed up for Christmas/ [in a motel] (V, p. 15)  and Bryn, who “was run over” on Highway 70 (VI, p.170).

In the summer they talked about the Braves;
sometimes they talked about the old Hickory Rebels,

which often led to motel stories, the lore,
and they laughed at the punch lines…
(XIII, p.25)

Peeler was living a story-teller’s dream; he was living in world of “chaos,/ when you are not in war,/ revolution, or murder,/ you are a Friday night/ at a cheap motel.” (XV, p. 29).  Chaos, you are a “Complaint call at three AM,” and you soon become a chick fight” in the “gravelly parking lot”  (XVI, p.30).  You are a “hooker [who] was a hollow-eyed junkie,/ tall, dark-haired with a pot belly”  (XVII, p. 31),  a “bearded Rainbow vacuum salesman/ and his cute little red headed wife,” who’d “always say they’d pay tomorrow” (XX, p.37), and the woman “He picked up/ at a bar called Yesterdays; [who had] gone to that Pleasure Dome/ for the hot legs contest”(XXI, p. 38).

Then “Swimming” became a whole new section.  “In the summer there was nothing/ like a beautiful girl at the pool/… [serving as] a priceless advertisement [for the motel]” (XXIII, p.43).

It was the summer that
Huey Lewis craved a new drug,
and we were caught between
the struggle to fill rooms
and the need to preserve them.
(XXVII, p.50)

In this section,  Peeler tells us, autobiographically,  that he “wrote a master’s thesis/ in a motel room/;  …[he was] poet laureate/ for the post office whores,” but it was in the night’s “black[ness],” as he changed fuses and fixed toilets, that he felt “blessed by moonlight.”  And as he tried to “clean a spot by the [pool’s] drain,” he “sensed [in gentle foreshadowing] that the water didn’t/ want to be there either” (XXV, pp. 47-48).

“Clerks” deals with Peeler’s co-workers at a time when it seemed “there was no afterlife,’ [unless he was living it] (XXVIII, p. 55); it seemed they would be clerks forever.

Things had not worked out;
he was out of college, married,
working as a desk clerk at
a small town motor lodge.

A local movie company made a deal
to rent thirty of their cheap rooms
for a month,…

…

He would tell the girls that
he was going to be a writer…
(XXIX, p.56)

The lives of the teenage actresses sounded glamorous compared to his.  They had come from “New York/ or New Jersey or Charlotte” (XXIX, p.56).  “[The girl] the old clerk can remember” was named Heather; she “went on to play/ a wet t-shirt girl/ in another teen picture” (XXIX. p 58). This is small town at its seemingly unimportant finest.

The clerks hung out together and developed a comradeship, based on common interests: movies, local bands, the blues.  But “back at the motel/ everybody thought/ we were just clerks (XXXIV, p.64).  Still, there were the dreams.  “Like my dad, I survived on/ five gallon ideas, that my/ children would rise above/ where I’d sunk them” (XL, p. 71).

“The old clerk was/ too much for one book,” so Peeler gave him a whole section to himself.  “He was the loneliest man,” writes Peeler, “I had ever seen” (XLI, p. 75).  Still, when asked about the “many good lookin’ whoas”—after “look[ing] down at his feet/ like a child embarrassed by praise”—the old clerk replied, “We used to have a shit pot full:/ every shape, shade or persuasion/ till all those Yankees come down here,/ married them, and took ‘em back home”(XLIV, p.79).

Memory is the horseshoe
that sometimes misses the stake,

…

I think of the old clerk now,
the shadow he cast over a newspaper

…

the light he moved through
to answer the switchboard…
(XLVIII, p. 84)

In “Aftermath,” Peeler looks back as he “drive[s] by [the motel] to [his] safe boring job/ which is rarely anything to write about,” and he is thankful (LX, p. 90).   He is thankful for his new job and for the memories.  It is in the in final poem, “I Say It Like a Prayer” that Peeler takes my breath away.  It is the best poem in the book.  When Peeler reads this poem, he lets the final line reverberate.  He lets my tears come to fruition.  Peeler is no longer in the motel business; for that, I am not sad.  Peeler has nothing but his prayer now.  And his memories.  And luckily, we have his poems.

In Checking Out, Tim Peeler writes narrative poems that are deceitful in their simplicity.  He can lull a reader into thinking he’s doing nothing special, then WHAM! He knocks his reader over with understatement or beauty.  Tim Peeler is a story-telling master.  Checking Out makes great summer reading.