June 25, 2021
I’m back for my second nap in the back of my truck parked at the public library in Hattiesburg. I’ve been trying to write about Hattiesburg, Elijah Jones and the whirlwind tour he gave me last night and this morning, but I think the two margaritas, the old fashioned, five cigarets and a special Elijah nightcap involving rum, watermelon vodka and a blend of guava, mango and Hawaiian Punch has my brain dialed to dim. Oh, and I’ve already failed at not having beef. Didn’t I proclaim abstinence just yesterday?
Last night was celebratory so a little overindulgence is to be expected since I haven’t seen Elijah in 42 years. I was just 13. He was 23. I think some of you have heard the story.
Elijah worked at the 7-11 down the street and I would go there to buy candy and then hang out with him. We became friends and he took me to see the movie Superman. A black man and a white boy was an odd pairing at the time in Mississippi. Maybe it still is, but not the black and white part anymore. Things have changed for the better. Much better.
When Elijah quit working at the 7-11 all those years ago I wondered what happened to him. Little did I know he had just moved to help open a brand new store across town where he became the manager. Hattiesburg had five 7-11s at that time. Now it has none. They’ve all become plain old gas stations or various quicky-type markets, all without exception looking somewhat run down. The red and green-striped marquees are gone or painted over.
Elijah isn’t sure why all the 7-11s are gone. Every other chain and franchise in the world seems to be bustling in Hattiesburg these days. The business section of old Hardy Street has been extended more than four miles west past I-59 since I was here. There are Targets, Bed Bath and Beyond, Home Depot, Office Depots, three Walmarts. Even Wells Fargo has made its way here. All that area was farmland before.
Elijah ponders what his life might have been like if he had stayed with 7-11 instead of hitching his wagon to the Richard Simmons enterprise. His mom was a go-getter and Elijah says he got that from her. The Southland Corporation that owned 7-11 was huge and Elijah believes he would have climbed pretty high in that environment. He got a degree in radio and television from the University of Southern Mississippi with a minor in journalism. That, no doubt, came in handy for what he ended up doing instead.
The last year he was with 7-11 Elijah started working on his weight.
“I had been avoiding going to the doctor,” he told me. “When I finally had a reason that made me go they weighed me. This was at the hospital. They had to take me up to the maternity ward because they didn’t have a scale big enough to measure me on the regular floor. I was so embarrassed that I was up there with all those white ladies with their new babies.”
Elijah related how he thought he weighed around 300 pounds:
“When I got on the scale I saw it go right past 300. Then it went past 400. Then 450. When it got to 484 and finally stopped I couldn’t believe it. I tell you Eric, that night when I went home I sat down on my bed and just cried. But something changed inside me. Instead of giving up I got angry.”
The next time I laid eyes on Elijah it wasn’t in-person but on tv. For some reason (Elijah says it was destiny) I was watching the Richard Simmons exercise show. Simmons was a spectacle but not part of my normal repertoire of Gilligan’s Island, I Love Lucy and a half dozen other syndicated reruns. When I saw a thin black man come from behind a screen on the television stage holding up a pair of bluejeans with a waistband the size of a lawn-and-leaf garbage bag I ran close to the tv. He was introduced as Elijah Jones. He had lost so much weight it was hard to recognize him, but I could see it was him through his eyes and his toothy side-smile that makes him look like one of the animated kids from Schoolhouse Rock.
After the television shoot Elijah hung around Los Angeles for a week. During that time a position working on the show opened up. Elijah had gone back to see the show as an audience member. The crew was at a loss for how to fill this low-level yet important position on short notice when somebody said, “Hey Elijah is still here. He could do that job.”
So that was the beginning of Elijah’s time with what he calls the Richard Simmons Empire. He ended up working 37 years with Richard Simmons working his way up to becoming his manager.
If anyone wants the scoop on Simmons you don’t need to listen to what the New York Times calls the morally suspect podcast Missing Richard Simmons. I can tell you. He’s done with fame…and it sounds like people in general. Elijah is upset by the loss of a very close (nonsexual) friendship. It’s likely that Elijah was his closest friend—at least for some period of time. But it sounds like Simmons has quit all his friendships except for a very few people who work for and help take care of him.
But back to the story of Elijah and me. It was one that I thought was through until about a decade ago when I met the writer Beth Lisick. She was working on a book that eventually came out titled, Helping Me Help Myself. In talking about it she mentioned that she had taken one of Richard Simmons’ Cruise to Loose Caribbean Tours to relate in a chapter of this book she was writing about self-improvement fads. I asked if she met a black man named Elijah on the cruise. Yes! He was Simmons’ right hand man. “They were almost inseparable,” she said.
It struck me as quite strange that as a tween in 1978 I’d had a short friendship with a 7-11 clerk in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and now in 2009 I was meeting a person at a bowling alley in Albany, CA who had met the person I knew as a kid. I had to reach out to Elijah.
I went to the Richard Simmons website and in a contact box I typed in a message asking if someone named Elijah worked for Richard Simmons. I said my name is Eric Robertson and I knew him when he worked at 7-11. He took me to see Superman.
The person who read the message contacted Elijah and well, here we are today.
p.s.—After my second nap it started raining. Yesterday when Elijah and I ate dinner there was a downpour that must have lasted thirty minutes. The street was a river. When I checked the back of my camper last night there was water again! That’s after adding caulk around all the windows in New Orleans. Fortunately, after my second nap in the library parking lot it started raining again and I was here to find the culprit of the leak. It’s coming in around a brake light at the top back of the shell. Easy fix with more goo!
p.s.s.-Bonus. I’m still out here in the library parking lot. It’s 6:43 and they’ve been closed since 5:00 but the wi-fi is still working!
Spotty West Goes East 