Brown ribbon, its shiny surface spinning, a neon crimson bead the size of an insect eye
part of Watauga County. Down the twisting blacktop behind my house was Valle Crucis
Download 2.99 Mb.
|
| part of Watauga County. Down the twisting blacktop behind my house was Valle Crucis
(translated “Vale of the Cross”) where in the soft green meadows was Mast General Store. In the winter’s hell you could warm yourself in front of the sizzling wood stove and look at the store’s old post office, general store goodies and talk to whoever you ran into, who was probably doing to be a member of the Mast family. In this Valhalla retreat Valle Crucis every summer met a group of the wildest softball players known to man. A transmigration of Laurinburg hippies and Watauga County hippies formed a softball tournament which began atop one of the hills of Valle Crucis. Here the ghosts of Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and the N.Y. Yankees lingered after dusk on a hill which ball players marked off and affectionately called “Yankee Stadium.” I’d walk to the tournament sometimes where everybody camped out on the Masts’ land with tents pitched, fires ablazing and parties unbashed. Guitars picking into the moonlight on a cool summer night as the bottle went round and everybody bragged about the play-of-the-game. Children played in the campground, bathing in the creek as parents and singles made love silently in the tents. Across the county is the sleepy borough of Blowing Rock, in the shadow of Grandfather Mountain and “Mildred the Bear,” an enormous overweight critter, gluttonous from the truckloads of marshmallows tossed in its den by tourists with sunglasses. Off U.S. 321 a geodesic dome housed what was one of the greatest bars of all time, “P.B. Scotts’s Music Hall.” R.E.M. used to play here when they were on the circuit and everybody from Hank Williams Jr. to B.B. King to Nantucket to Leon Russell. The guy in the white hair is Bobby Cremins taking a break with some of the basketball coaches at Appalachian State. Wood rafter supported the second and third floors of this round, upside-down cup-shaped barn with its sky windows, tall ceiling and excellent sound system. One night John, my next door neighbor in Vilas, and I stumbled into the club, and my assignment was to try to interview Gregg Allman. John was getting tanked on liquor that night, and we switched to beer as the doors opened and the crowd started filing in. “How are you going to interview him? Let me hold your camera for you. They’ll think I’m going to take some pictures.” “You getting pretty messed up, man. You can hold it for a little while.” “You’re going to let me go in and interview him with you aren’t you?” Having already made up my mind John was going to sit out the fourth quarter courtside, I grinned, rubbing my beard and taking a gulp of beer. “You’re in like Flint. Just lay low now. Don’t raise too much Cain. Look there’s Rene.” “How many women have we both had?” he asked. “I dunno. Well, there’s, let’s see, one, two, three-four...should we count, yeah, five.” “Come on let me go in with you just for a little while.” “SK! SK-K-K-K!” “SKANK!” John and I had a communicative system down in which if there was something, someone or a situation that we did not like, we would each or both say the word “skank,” enunciating it differently with staccato customization. If we liked something, we would inversely utter “Sweet!” followed by “Sweetly petite,” after Lurch’s phrase on “The Addams Family” TV show during the opening credits when he would say, “Sweet, petite.” Usually our secret clandestine references of “Sweet!” were when both accessing the beauty of a female. After the great show, the second time I had seen Gregg Allman, I blew John off, exiting to the tour bus outside and stood in the chill, asking a roadie or a manager for an interview, and before you could say “Southbound,” I was on the bus interviewing one of the few musicians I like more than Tommy Faile. “Just say that he was the greatest slide guitar player that ever lived,” he said. And that’s what I said. I couldn’t write about the cocaine he pulled out and we did with a female journalist from Tennessee or about Allman asking me if there were any Quaaludes around. “They quit making those about five years ago, man,” I thought. I was so starstruck and messed up that I left the company camera onboard the bus, and had to drive like a maniac on slick icy roads to the Ramada Inn in Boone 13 miles away and retrieve the 35-mm. 1995: The other morning I awakened to discover that some culprit had vomited in the can. Who was it? Could I pin it on them? Why did they do it? I’ve been drinking too much. A friend of mine is a journalist, and he’s an alcoholic, going to AA meetings, and he gives me teetotal hell. Shots of Absolut in lemon drops. The favorite liquid of choice is Budweiser. I like it in the can now. I used to love the bottles though. In high school the quart bottle was the host. The first time I ever got really drunk was when I drove down to the liquor store across the state line in McColl where this old guy, a big dude, sold liquor to anyone who looked old enough and many who did not. The smell of this store I can still smell today. There’s a merchandising cardboard odor plus a sweet smell of liquor. It smelled like a drug store. There were displays. Chiming your existence, the brass bell alerted the store to your presence. Feeling young, it was best to put on this older, much more mature body language to try and fool what doubting Thomases were still balking. “You got an I.D.?” “Sure, my good man.” He would never smile. He would just squint into the fake I.D. and turn around, grasping the correct bottle of Canadian blend into a brown paper sack, making this wrinkling paper sound and twisting its top like it was the neck of a chicken. My buddy and I took our booty down the beach cottage and drank it after consuming mass quantities of shrimp at Calabash. All I can remember is filling up the tub with a bunch of funky looking material with these shrimp swimming around. It was one of the worst hangovers of my life. Your first hangover is the worst. It’s the one you judge all others on. If I had said, “I’ll never do this again,” then, well, I might have a clearer head than I do today. I can’t remember the second time I ever got drunk. I remember the last time I got drunk. There have been several thousand occasions since then. When was the last time? It was today. Sizzling on the gas grill was a cut chicken I had used a knife and hammer to dislocate from its original form. Cooked slowly, as if in a professional kitchen, it simmered on low as supple amounts of barbecue sauce were applied with a brush and puffs of savory smoke billowed from the flames. It was $100 well-spent before it was well-earned. A small magazine designed by a Civil War enthusiast had been my next target, Pee Dee Magazine, after getting fired in Florence, and I had successfully conned the editor into thinking a story on my hot air balloonist would be an interesting story. The editors scammed a free trip aboard the vessel. I had stopped doing too many suicidal things many years earlier. The flier was from Florence, and would buy me beers in a bar over there when I was at the paper. The day he ascended for me was a cold December day, the day of my first and last Christmas dinner from work. I had to beg administration to fork over prize money we won for covering a tornado that struck Lake City, a tobacco warehouse haven. As law enforcement authorities tried to keep TV reporters away from the scene, blue strobing lights blinded you as twirling smoky gray clouds fingered at the treetops while victims tried to reconcile the loss of trailers, property and front yards. The paper had won some money, but it wasn’t reaching us. First a memo went out saying it would be split; then there was a memo on how it would be split, requesting ideas. The original idea, and mine, was for it to be distributed among the reporters and editors on the job that day, but that suggestion morphed into the final edict that would invite the entire newsroom staff to Ryan’s Steakhouse where egos clashed like fiery asteroids into ice lakes. I was playing Pink Floyd as I wheeled my smoking Pontiac into the parking lot and everybody stared. Before I was supposed to fly, my stomach had been churning like our family’s old hand-cranked homemade ice cream cedar barrel. Our staff at the Florence Morning News finally got our reward. It took a lot of bitching and complaining and getting the other staff members talking about it, but it had been almost a year since the Thomson company award for our tornado coverage, and the monetary award was going to be split among the folks working that day. Then it dwindled down to everybody. Then the idea just vanished. Nobody ever mentioned it. It was like bringing up about Cousin Harold who had caught AIDS. Ever wonder what to do on a crowded elevator when somebody just cut a raunchy, rotten, five-day-old corndog fart? “I think we ought to get the money,” I’d say. Then the managing editor decided. Or someone did. It was set in stone. All right. No questions this time. We were all going to get in our cars, drop what we were doing and have a nice Christmas time feeling at the frigging Quincy’s for the lunch special. That was the way to spread that tornado money out. Conversation was choppy, disconcerting and awkward as a Marilyn Manson appearance at a DAR meeting. I turned up the music real loud before I wheeled into the parking lot. What a miserable lunch! It almost reminded me of the black clouds which were reassembling above us outside of Lake City the day roofs were torn up and trees were dislodged from the sod. “How about moving that TV cord!” a cop yelled. The tornado had been through, and our ears were popping as the weird, fast-moving dark wisps of cloud whizzed by. “Were you the first one here?” Every reporter always wants to know who got to the scene first and who was late. There is a chromosome tendency to break the law and speed to the scene when you’re working first, second or third shift, but the trick is to slow down before you get a ticket. Getting a newspaper to pay for a speeding ticket or the cost of towing or even the costs of court in case of incarceration due to stepping on a source. The only reason journalists refuse to name sources to brain-damaged circuit court judges is because their greedy bosses don’t have enough courage or human integrity to tell the truth and be honest, admitting that their only source of enjoyment is making toothless judges look bad from a distance. Ever thrown a rock at a caged animal? You’ve tapped at the fish bowl a time or two. You have that look in your eye. That was the most uncomfortable lunch I ever had, sitting too close to people with whom you could not work, especially the chief photographer. I hate taking pictures. Photographers are definitely, save sports folks, the weirdest clientele of dysfunctional brainiacs I’ve ever had the misfortune of falling into. There are super egos, and there are super-duper super-egos, and our photographer treated us like children, much like his own which wandered recklessly without supervision through the newsroom when there weren’t wheels on duty. “Leave that camera the way you found it,” he’d say. “Hold the strap, that’s right. That’s what it’s there for. Use all the film. Check that camera in. Tim, did you date the sign-in sheet when you brought it back from the Darlington Racetrack?” I wanted so badly to take one of those cameras and shove it far up his ass, so far that the durned thing started clicking away at shots of the abyss where flesh meets intellect not far up the road. It was this special day, the day we all prayed together as somebody spewed air from the ice cream machine, that I was to go aloft in a hot air balloon and set sail over Darlington County way above the December chill and into the stratosphere where it was really cold. I got in the basket for a minute while the balloon inflated and rose about six feet. That’s enough for me. “You’re not really going up in that thing are you, Kris?” Our photographer was excited about the trip, but I had long since sworn off dangerous activities, especially the kind which could take place before you had enough money for life insurance. “The only hard part is coming down.” Balloons have been designed in the form of tennis shoes, Korbel champagne bottles, a Pepsi can, Kodak film, a Burger King hamburger, Planter’s Mr. Peanut, vodka bottles and almost any advertising hook under the sun. There would be only two more months I had on the job at the Florence Morning News when I first interviewed and published the first newspaper story on him. My stomach was churning. I hate to fly. “Man wasn’t made to fly,” I tell my nephews. “Why, Uncle Tim?” “Because you don’t see any wings on my shoulders, now do you?” “No. You don’t have wings.” “So man was not made to fly. There’s no way I’m going to get on one of those things. They weigh tons. How does something like that fly? I’m not going down like that. You can’t even wear a parachute. My old editor would probably pack mine, no problem. You trust planes?” Before I was supposed to fly, my stomach had been churning like our old hand-cranked homemade ice cream cedar barrel. Our staff at the Florence Morning News finally got our reward. It took a lot of bitching and complaining and getting the other staff members talking about it, but it had been almost a year since the Thomson company award for our tornado coverage, and the monetary award was going to be split among the folks working that day. Then it dwindled down to everybody. Then the idea just vanished. Nobody ever mentioned it. It was like bringing up about Cousin Harold who had caught AIDS. Ever wonder what to do on a crowded elevator when somebody just cut a raunchy, rotten, five- day-old corndog fart? “I think we ought to get the money,” I’d say. Then the managing editor decided. Or someone did. It was set in stone. All right. No questions this time. We were all going to get in our cars, drop what we were doing and have a nice Christmas time feeling at the frigging Quincy’s for the lunch special. That was the way to spread that tornado money out. Conversation was choppy, disconcerting and awkward as a Marilyn Manson appearance at a DAR meeting. I turned up the music real loud before I wheeled into the parking lot. What a miserable lunch! It almost reminded me of the black clouds which were reassembling above us outside of Lake City the day roofs were torn up and trees were dislodged from the sod. “How about moving that TV cord!” a cop yelled. The tornado had been through, and our ears were popping as the weird, fast-moving dark wisps of cloud whizzed by. “Were you the first one here?” Every reporter always wants to know who got to the scene first and who was late. There is a chromosome tendency to break the law and speed to the scene when you’re working first, second or third shift, but the trick is to slow down before you get a ticket. Getting a newspaper to pay for a speeding ticket or the cost of towing or even the costs of court in case of incarceration due to stepping on a source. The only reason journalists refuse to name sources to brain-damaged circuit court judges is because their greedy bosses don’t have enough courage or human integrity to tell the truth and be honest, admitting that their only source of enjoyment is making toothless judges look bad from a distance. Ever thrown a rock at a caged animal? You’ve tapped at the fish bowl a time or two. You have that look in your eye. ***************** Off work/The Way Somebody stole the Sunday paper. I’m still getting The Florence Morning News, and since February when I got fired, it still finds its way to the driveway every morning around 4 a.m. I should call them and tell them to quit sending the free employee copy, but then, when I get to the TV section, sports and classified for job opportunities, I change my mind abruptly. This process takes place daily. Today I become paranoid and believe they have found me out and plan to bill me for six months of papers or maybe they’ve finally cut me off, the final incision. I must not have put the trash out early enough Sunday for the large blue Mafia garbage system receptacle still has my beer cans and refuse from last week. It was a good week, all in all, except for its trash. Maybe they did not pick up my trash because of all the recyclable metal, the aluminum cans which held so many suds. My landlady is against drinking, either social or excessive, and I have to hide my cans in the trash, underneath the gooey maggoty foodstuffs, covering the cans with trash if they are visible after the lid is raised. I can’t put them in the recyclable bin or she’ll have an educated, informed database in which to deduct that there is an award-winning amount of imbibing being accomplished on her property. If you stacked all the beer cans I’ve crunched since I moved into this apartment four Augusts ago, well you’d have enough money to buy enough shares of blue chips to ensure a very comfortable retirement. It got so hot one night, I broke into the garage and put the window air conditioning unit gathering mothballs in there in the apartment where the unit had passed on to the AC junkyard in the sky. Golf soothes the mind. As my new air conditioning hums like a carriage of angels, The British Open ends with Palmer’s last walk to 18. I always know it’s the Sabbath when golf is on television. Why do I want to rehash the paranoia, naked, blind obsession and sadness of The Way International and what happened when a few of its members first showed up in Boone, N.C. on the campus of Appalachian State University in a female dorm TV room scouting for neophytes? Should I go get cigarettes now or wait till I finish this pack? Pulling up the box of Way materials, the roaches vamoose from their paper domicile. The first paper on top of the stack is an employee performance evaluation done on me Jan. 17, 1985 at the Watauga Democrat where I covered The Way. “Date of Last Review: May 84.” Job understanding (gotta an “S” which must mean satisfactory, job performance got an F, which must mean fault, funky or failed. Dependability got an F as did job productivity with a G for cooperation, and an overall rating of S. Nothing has changed. I’m still the same. In the general comments category it read, “Mr. Bullard is sloppy in both work and appearance. He needs to take more pride in work produced and in his personal appearance at work and in public. He is not as unbiased as he should be in certain story areas. Mr. Bullard does work in cooperation with others. He is willing to work hard at times and go the extra mile on some stories.” Thanks to “reviewing officer” Tim Smith and “reviewing officer” Sandra Shook. Let’s turn the clock back to notes down in the stack of the box. This time machine thrusts you into the fall of 1982 with the recruitment of an 18-year-old student and the reason I ended up in the offices of Rolling Stone magazine with vertigo. Can I get a witness? Religion is the opiate of the masses, according to a communist - it’s just like falling in love or booting heroin. A little taste sparks an itch that has to be scratched until blood appears, and the shock scares the daylights out of you. Then it’s too late, unless you’re one of the few who can dabble in moderation. The uncontrollable lust triumphs over better judgment, propriety and limitations. “Since August there has been an ecclesiastical battle of hunger surfacing in the scenic mountain town of Boone, North Carolina involving members of The Way International,” I typed. “Let’s go to the Rock!” John yelled. “Why don’t you take a break from that typewriter.” “You know I have to finish this. Got any weed?” “I scraped out the bowl. Oughta be pretty good? How’s it coming along? It’s hot as hell in here.” Hissing and emitting a gaseous smell of kerosene, the oil heater in my Vilas apartment was burning on “HIGH.” “I’m just getting started. Working on a lead. I hope they don’t care at the paper what I’m doing.” “You’ll be all right. Got the rent in yet?” We had the same landlord, and the first of the month had come and passed. He was a kind landlord, very understanding. In the winter John and I would sneak down to the store in 50-below temps to nab the weekend’s goodies. He and Brian McGee, a pizza tosser who lived with me for a while, tried to kill my chicken once, chasing it around the yard for the kill, but they never caught it. It was a fun Thanksgiving nonetheless. “Listen, John. I’ve been meaning to ask you....” “Are you fixing to try to borrow some more money from me? How much is it up to now? How much you need?” “Ah, $25. I’ll let you read the first little bit here. Are Jeff’s socks still smelling up your apartment?” I would make the $150 rent after all. “That looks good, ecclesiastical?” “Like that?” John’s father was an Episcopal minister. After torching his bong, John continued reading. “Deprogramming, brainwashing and freedom of religion are among the quarrels in this clash of holymen. Watauga County contains over 31,000 northwestern North Carolina residents, 10,000 of whom live in Boone, the county seat which has eight elementary schools and a high school. Appalachian State University, a four-year, state-operated college attended by over 10,000 students, employs more than 1,400 citizens who help produce a yearly payroll of about $22 million - the largest since income provider in the county at 3,333 feet above sea level.” (“All factual, but very sloppy, needs smoothing and unity. Transition will reveal your “style.”) “Is that what the Rolling Stone editor wrote in the margin? Are we that high, 3,333 feet?” “Not yet. Crack me a coolie. Those on the porch are probably frozen by now. Want to go to the Rhododendron Tournament with me this weekend? All the hippies from Scotland County and Laurinburg are coming up.” “That’s that annual thing out in Valle Crucis, isn’t it? The Blowing Rock Waterdogs won last year. What’s that team from where you’re from? Sandhills Gold?” Today I smoke Sandhills Gold as I sift through an old box of clippings and Way junk. In the March-April 1981 issue of The Way Magazine there is a photograph of Dr. Victor Paul Wierwille at Washington National Airport. He has a tall, chimneysweep, stovepipe hat and a striped ascot. He and his wife are in Washington, D.C. to attend the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, the magazine reports. His address starts out with, “This is a momentous day in the history of our lives....As I Download 2.99 Mb. Share with your friends:
|