Wiles-Smith Drugstore – Memphis Flyer

On Saturdays, my grandfather used to take me and the other grandkids to Wiles-Smith Drugstore for lunch. We would sit, hang out and be kids, drink malted milkshakes, and eat hot dogs or club sandwiches or tuna-fish salads. He would always get the same thing: a bowl of chili with three or so crackers, and he’d bring his own Mississippi-style tamales with him.

I remember there was a vintage copper-plated weighing scale when you first entered. My cousin Will and I would play with it, feeding it coins, taking turns getting weighed. It spat out a paper card with a fortune on it. What was mindless scrawl for an adult had seemed like wisdom to our little-kid-brains, with our wild imaginations. Gumball machines and tchotchkes littered the store. Above the register were mindless doodles and political cartoons. One of those cartoons I remember fondly: a duck looking calm above the water, but paddling maddeningly below the surface. The joke, I don’t remember. That’s not the important part to me. The cashier was an old man, the owner I believe, who wore tiny half-moon glasses and knew my grandfather by name. When I went to the bathroom, there was a dingy glow to the bulb and the towel was a recycled cloth roll. I spent half my bathroom breaks just tugging on it, making the Sisyphean object endlessly move, imagining that each rotation was actually a brand-new roll.

Wiles-Smith burned down in 2014, a year before I graduated from college.

Recently, another Memphis staple lost its home to rising rent: Black Lodge.

When I first encountered this wonderful establishment, it lived in Cooper-Young, every wall covered in DVDs, each section its own genre. Movies weren’t categorized as just Horror or Comedy. Instead, as Auteurs or Moods. One section, I recall, was Anime Classics. Neon Genesis and Akira rested on the shelves. David Lynch had his own dedicated section. Every single iteration of that man’s genius sat on its own shelf. That’s how I found DumbLand, the greatest “stupidity” I’ve ever enjoyed.

It wasn’t just a rental shop, though. Kids of all ages would be there, lounged and perched like cats in an adoption center, just hanging out and shooting the shit. Once, I went on a date there, and all we did was watch a movie on the TV. I think it was Ennio Morricone’s Django. Or maybe the director was Sergio Corbucci. Matt, the proprietor, would know. He knows every movie, and, in fact, a secret of his was to know the movie you wanted before you could even say so.

Black Lodge, a year or so after I went to college, had to move. When I came back to Memphis after my six-month stint in Portland, I got a room next door to the old location and watched as the landlord slowly transformed the place into a music venue. A piece of my heart broke with each hammer against board.

When Black Lodge found a new home in the Crosstown area, they put all their money and sweat and tears and, possibly literally, blood into it. At first, it was a success. They drew in old heads and new ones, too. Slowly, they added a bar and kitchen and started having movie nights. A local chef, Jimmy, had crafted five-course meals for $60 a seat, designed around a certain movie. The event for Everything Everywhere All at Once had hot-dogs, congee, and an everything bagel dessert. It was a perfect experience.

There were other events, too: drag performances, wrestling shows, and even a few raves. Local musicians got their start on the stage, comedy troupes hosted sketches twice a month, and still, yes, folks rented tons of movies. There were spots for gamers and board-game enthusiasts. Truly, Black Lodge was the third space to end all third spaces.

But not even they could survive the Covid-19 pandemic and rising rent in Memphis. Alas, they shuttered their doors mid-August 2024.

As I write this, I think of these other third spaces in danger right now: local cafes especially. One place, Java Cabana, is renovating, and I hope they get business when they reopen.

Oh, where are those diners? Where are our lodges? How much longer will we even have our green spaces? I can already hear a developer singing out: You can build apartments there, you know …

I may miss my milkshakes and my grandfather. But I hope I don’t add third spaces to that list as well. Cherish what you have while it’s here.

William Smythe is a local writer and poet. He writes for Focus Mid-South, an LGBT+ magazine.

Sbukley | Dreamstime.com

Joan Rivers

I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, pass out, throw up, or do all that at once. This past week has been like a roller coaster of good, bad, sad, goofy, and downright absurd things.

First, I feel like I have a giant, gaping black hole in my psyche because of Joan Rivers’ death. Oh, I know. Many of you know her only as the plastic surgery-addicted fashion commentator from the E! Network, but I grew up on Joan Rivers, and in my opinion she was one of the top five funniest people in history. I always thought of her as something of the older sister I never had. Yes, she was mean in some of her humor but never mean-spirited. Yes, she made fun of people but never more than she made fun of herself. And I think she probably really admired the people she made the most fun of. “What did Elizabeth Taylor say when the waiter asked her what she wanted on her hamburger? A hot dog!” Come on, now. That’s funny! That’s from when Liz was married to that Republican senator and was living on fried chicken and Percocet somewhere out in the country and gained a lot of weight. I can relate.

Sbukley | Dreamstime.com

Joan Rivers

And Rivers was often filthy. Hilariously filthy. About her own daughter she said, and I paraphrase, “She called to tell me that she turned down $400,000 from Playboy to photograph her naked from the waist up, and she wanted my approval. I told her, tell them you’ll take another $200,000 and show them your (another word for ‘cat’ here).” Of all of the heinous, mindless, terrible, unwatchable reality-type shows on television, Fashion Police was hilarious — and a secret guilty pleasure for more people than you know.

I’m also very sad about the news of Wiles-Smith Drug Store on Union Avenue closing. It has been around almost as long as Joan Rivers, and there’s no other place like it that I know of in Memphis. I’d wager to say there aren’t many places like that left anywhere. For those of you who have never been, you should get to their lunch counter (yes, lunch counter in a drug store, still) for a tuna plate or one of their grilled cheese sandwiches and/or one of their famous homemade milk shakes. Their closing is like the end of an era to me. It was pretty much the last bastion of the charm Union Avenue once possessed, before everything was torn down to make way for a zillion ugly fast-food restaurants. Oh, there are still some nice businesses on the street — 1910 Frameworks, Commercial Bank & Trust, the Art Center, and Little Italy — but there will never be another Wiles-Smith.

The most baffling thing of the week to me was the new Mississippi tax-free weekend on guns and ammunition. Really? Mississippi has the highest hunger rate of any state in the country and rather than have a tax-free food weekend, the legislature passed a bill to allow people to buy guns and ammo without paying taxes? And they think this is going to be great for their economy? Economy for whom, you freaking morons? It’s not like someone who can’t afford to buy food can afford to buy a gun to kill a deer to eat. One gun store owner was quoted as saying, “These are big-ticket items that people in the South really support, so it makes a lot of sense. If you go out and purchase a $1,000 firearm, you are gonna save $70. You equate that to a tank of gas or a couple of outfits for your children. So it’s definitely beneficial.” What in the hell does that mean? It makes so little sense I can’t even think of a way to respond to it.

But forget all that tomfoolery. The best news in the past few weeks is that President Obama has selected our own Reverend Al Green to be one of the recipients of this year’s Kennedy Center Honors and man, does he deserve it. I think Al Green is in a category so much his own that sometimes Memphis forgets that he is ours and that he lives here, and has for all of his adult life. We forget that he has a church in Whitehaven, where he preaches and sings almost every Sunday of the year to crowds of mainly European visitors, who are here to watch this internationally beloved icon in his little, round church, Al Green’s Full Gospel Tabernacle. Now that would have been a great place for Joan Rivers’ funeral.