John Henry Days
John Henry Days
Colson Whitehead
From the author of ‘The Underground Railroad’, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and Longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.‘John Henry Days’ is a novel of extraordinary scope and mythic power. It established Colson Whitehead as a pre-eminent American writer of our time.Building the railways that made America, John Henry died with a hammer in his hand moments after competing against a steam drill in a battle of endurance. The story of his death made him a legend.Over a century later, J. Sutter, a freelance journalist and accomplished expense account abuser, is sent to West Virginia to cover the launch of a new postage stamp at the first 'John Henry Days' festival.John Henry Days is a work of extraordinary scope, revealing how a nation creates its present through the stories it tells of its past.
Copyright (#ulink_eb0fe7ef-e11c-55ad-8bfc-ab7ae8472612)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain in 2001 by 4th Estate.
Copyright © Colson Whitehead 2001
Colson Whitehead asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
The author has sought to obtain any necessary permissions for quotations included in this book, but has not always been able to locate their authors. If an author of a quotation wishes to contact the author of this book, he or she should contact him through the publisher.
The following sections of the prologue are reprinted from previously published material: Sections 2, 5, 6, 9 and 11 from John Henry: Tracking Down a Negro Legend, by Guy B. Johnson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1929); Sections 3, 7, 10, 12, 13 and 14 from John Henry: A Folk-Lore Study, by Louis W. Chappell (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1968); Section 4 from “John Hardy,” by John Harrington Cox, published in the Journal of American Folk-Lore (October-December 1919).
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9781841155708
Ebook Edition © September 2015 ISBN: 9780007476541
Version: 2017-02-15
Dedication (#ulink_c76ba4ab-5eee-5b50-a6f1-9d275cde49c8)
To N. S.
Contents
Cover (#u99f5668f-a79f-5c63-bb38-b3def4899a39)
Title Page (#u0622c290-59ad-5a3c-b85e-2c5e5d262194)
Copyright (#udac94838-5f96-50a6-9a7f-91ea994550cf)
Dedication (#u2815d912-2934-51cc-965f-5e30222e42f0)
PROLOGUE
PART ONE: TERMINAL CITY
Now he blesses the certainty of airports
J. sits in the backseat of an
After the killing is over, after the
Dave Brown’s byline is a roach whose
Benny waits for gravel to become hail
No one, it seems, wants to go
Everything on him is free. His black
It has been six months since her
J. catches up with Dave Brown in
The List possessed a will and function
This inveigler of invites and slayer of
What makes him tick, this collector of
Applause, hands sliding toward slanted forks, as
PART TWO: MOTOR LODGE NOCTURNE
The first blow shattered half the bones
It was custom on nights like this
Sometimes it happens. Nothing he can put
Benny said he didn’t want to go
Bobby Figgis began his career as a
Yes, her father would have loved it
Soon it will be time for the
Junketeer lore holds that when One Eye
Alphonse Miggs lies on his bed half-naked
J. lies on his bed in room
PART THREE: ON THE EFFECTS OF COUNTRY AIR
The assistant paymaster delivered word of the
Sunglasses: where are they? Sunglasses prevent arrest
It does not take Guy Johnson long
Even when he doesn’t want to Bobby
Every day in that place reduced his
The individual who wishes to purchase a
The place mats of Herb’s Country Style
There is a peaceful listlessness in the
It’s like living in a bum’s tin
Sneaky Petes, both of them, aware of
Excerpts from Hamm’s Stamp Gossip, “The Year
Adventure as she steps on the bridge
J. and Monica the Publicist were fucking
Look, there’s Paul Robeson on Broadway, in
It’s me. Calling to see if you’re
It is odd because it is just
PART FOUR: THE STEEL-DRIVING THEORY OF LIFE
They come out of cars. Out of
Don’t find a lot of white men
How do you fit all that in
When the Sepia Ladies Club convenes in
The citizens practice their aim. Some shoot
Soon after her father died the temp
The old connections re-form, and Lucien is
At the all-night bodega of souls the
The biggest spud in Summers County is
They were all there, from the eminently
PART FIVE: ADDING VERSES
Even this late in the performance, there
The purpose of the blackout curtains utilized
“When we finally got the dishwasher, my
The day in the mountain was almost
That spring there were pipebombs and pipebombs
Every Sunday morning is a blessing from
The same night as the shooting in
She wore blue. The song said never
As he did every morning to prepare
John Henry stood in the work camp
J. Sutter stands in the parking lot
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Colson Whitehead (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ucc6548cb-b20f-59a8-b18a-e16df571730f)
About 45 years ago I was in Morgan County, Kentucky. There was a bunch of darkeys came from Miss. to assist in driving a tunnel at the head of Big Caney Creek for the O&K railroad. There is where I first heard this song, as they would sing it to keep time with their hammers.
HAVING SEEN YOUR advertisement in the Chicago Defender, I am answering your request for information, concerning the Old-Time Hero of the Big Bend Tunnel Days—or Mr. John Henry.
I have succeeded in recalling and piecing together 13 verses, dedicated to such a splendid and deserving character of by gone days. It was necessary to interview a number of Old-Timers of the Penitentiary to get some of the missing words and verify my recollections; so I only hope it will please you, and be what you wish.
In regards to the reality of John Henry, I would say he was a real live and powerful man, some 50 years ago, and actually died after beating a steam drill. His wife was a very small woman who loved John Henry with all her heart.
My Grand Father, on my mother’s side, was a steel driver, and worked on all them big jobs through out the country, in them days, when steam drills were not so popular. He was always boasting about his prowess with a hammer, claiming none could beat him but John Henry. He used to sing of John Henry, and tell of the old days when hammers and hammer men could do the work of the steam drills.
Being pretty young at the time, I can not now recall all the stories I heard, but I know John Henry, died some time in the eighties about 1881 or 1882, I’m sure which was a few years before I was born.
I am setting a price on this information; I am a prisoner here in the Ohio Penitentiary and without funds, so I will be pleased to expect what ever you care to offer.
IN 1890 PEOPLE around town here were singing the song of John Henry, a hammering man. I was working in an oyster house here in Norfolk, Va. for Fenerstein and Company, and I am 66 years old and still working for them people.
JOHN HENRY WAS a steel driver and was famous in the beginning of the building of the C&O Railroad. He was also a steel driver in the extension of the N&W Railroad. It was about 1872 that he was in this section. This was before the day of the steam drills and drill work was done by two powerful men who were special steel drillers. They struck the steel from each side and as they struck the steel they sang a song which they improvised as they worked. John Henry was the most famous steel driver ever known in southern West Virginia. He was a magnificent specimen of genus homo, was reported to be six feet two, and weighed two hundred and twenty-five or thirty pounds, was a straight as an arrow and was one of the handsomest men in the country—and, as one informant told me, was a black as a kittle in hell.
Whenever there was a spectacular performance along the line of drilling, John Henry was put on the job, and it is said he could drill more steel than any two men of his day. He was a great gambler and was notorious all through the country for his luck at gambling. To the dusky sex all through the country he was “the greatest ever,” and he was admired and beloved by all the negro women from the southern West Virginia line to the C&O. In addition to this he could drink more whiskey, sit up all night and drive steel all day to a greater extent than any man at that time. A man of kind heart, very strong, pleasant address, yet a gambler, a roué, a drunkard and a fierce fighter.
MY NAME IS Harvey Hicks and I live in Evington, Virginia. I am writing in reference to your ad in the Chicago Defender. John Henry was a white man they say. He was a prisoner when he was driving steel in the Big Ben tunnel at the time, and he said he could beat the steam drill down. They told him if he did they would set him free. It is said he beat the steam drill about two minutes and a half and fell dead. He drove with a hammer in each hand, nine pound sledge.
MY UNCLE GUS (the man who raised my father) worked on the Cursey Mountain Tunnel and knew the man. He said he was Jamaican, yellow-complected, tall, and weighed about 200 pounds.
I AM A steam shovel operator or “runner” and have heard steel drivers sing “John Henry” all my life and there are probably lots of verses I never heard as it used to be that every new steel driving “nigger” had a new verse to “John Henry.”
I never personally knew John Henry, but I have talked to many old-timers who did. He actually worked on the Chesapeake & Ohio Ry. for Langhorn & Langhorn and was able to drive 9 feet of steel faster than the steam drill could in Big Bend Tunnel. Then later he was hanged in Welch, Va., for murdering a man. After sifting out the “chaff” I think I can assure you above is correct.
I have heard three versions of the song, mostly in the same section of the country, that is West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina, seldom elsewhere except by men from one of the above states. I have worked all over the South, South West, and I have heard the John Henry song almost ever since I could remember, and it is the song I ever first remember of.
I THINK THIS John Henry stuff is just a tale someone started. My father worked for the Burleigh Drill Company and told me for a fact that no steam drill was ever used in the Big Bend Tunnel. He was a salesman for Burleigh.
JOHN HENRY WAS a native of Holly Springs, Mississippi, and was shipped to the Curzee mountain tunnel, Alabama, to work on the AGS Railway in 1880. I have been told that he did indeed beat the steam drill, but did not die that day. He was killed some time later during a cave-in.
HAVING BEEN BORN and raised in the state of Tennessee and, therefore, in sufficiently close contact with the negro element there, it happens I have heard these songs practically all my life, until I left that section of the country six years ago.
I have been informed that John Henry was a true character all right, a nigger whose vocation was driving steel during the construction of a tunnel on one of the Southern railways.
THE BALLAD, BY special right, belongs to the railroad builders. John Henry was a railroad builder. It belongs to the pick-and-shovel men—to the skinners—to the steel drivers—to the men of the construction camps. It is sung by Negro laborers everywhere, and none can sing it as they sing it, because none honor and revere the memory of John Henry as much as do they. I have been a “Rambler” all my life—ever since I ran away from the “white folks” when twelve years old—and have worked with my people in railroad grading camps from the Great Lakes to Florida and from the Atlantic to the Missouri River, and wherever I have worked, I have always found someone who could and would sing of John Henry.
JOHN HENRY THE steel driving champion was a native of Alabama and from near Bessemer or Blackton. The steel driver was between the ages of 45 and 50 and weighed about 155 pounds. He was not a real black man, but more of a chocolate color. He was straight and well muscled.
THE LAST TIME I saw John Henry, who was called Big John Henry, was when a blast fell on him and another Negro. They were covered with blankets and carried out of the tunnel. I don’t think John Henry was killed in the accident because I didn’t hear of him being buried, and the bosses were always careful in looking after the injured and dead. I don’t know a thing about John Henry driving steel in a contest with a steam drill, and I don’t think I ever saw one at the tunnel. Hand drills were used in the tunnel. They were using an engine at shaft number one to raise the bucket up when we moved to the tunnel, but they didn’t have any steam engine or steam drill in the tunnel.
I’VE HEARD THE song in a thousand different places, nigger extra gangs, hoboes of all kinds, coal miners and furnace men, river and wharf rats, beach combers and sailors, harvest hands and timber men. Some of them drunk and some of them sober. It is scattered over all the states and some places on the outside. I have heard any number of verses cribbed bodily from some other song or improvised to suit the occasion.
The opinion among hoboes, section men and others who sing the song is that John Henry was a Negro, “a coal black man” a partly forgotten verse says, “a big fellow,” an old hobo once said. He claimed to have known him but he was drunk on Dago Red, so I’m discounting everything he said. I have met very few who claimed to have known him. The negroes of forty years ago regarded him as a hero of their race.
PART ONE TERMINAL CITY (#ucc6548cb-b20f-59a8-b18a-e16df571730f)
Now he blesses the certainty of airports (#ucc6548cb-b20f-59a8-b18a-e16df571730f). His blessings, when he has occasion to perform them, are swift and minimal, thoroughly secular, consisting of a slight nod to no one present, a chin dip that no witness will mark. He nods to luck mostly, to express gratitude for whatever sliver of good fortune drops before his shoes. The day’s first blessing is occasioned by a solemn white rind, a little feather, that J. Sutter notices a few yards away on the carpet and immediately recognizes, without a shade of doubt, to be a receipt.
He looks left and he looks right. He waits for one of those dull marchers to open a fanny pack, turn rigid in horror, and retrace steps to rescue the lost receipt as the wheels of their plastic luggage carve evanescent grooves in the purple carpet behind them. It could belong to any one of these folks. The anxious dislocation of travel causes them to compulsively pat pockets for wallets and passports, to stroke telltale ridges in canvas bags that most definitely must be the ticket and boarding pass, but not so definitely that the ridge must not be checked again, the bag unzipped and inspected for the hundredth time that day. In this queasy awareness of their trifling, they might notice the disappearance of a receipt more readily and start searching for it. He factors this consideration into his calculation of how long it will take him to salvage the receipt from its immediate peril in the walkway.
It taunts him, vibrates flirtatiously. What does it record? There are all sorts of things you can buy at an airport, they are becoming more and more like cities every day, one lumbering transcontinental metropolis. Double-A batteries, a teddy bear, a toothbrush to replace the one forgotten back home on the sink. A nourishing lunch—he hopes for lunch because he is hungry and the next best thing to an actual sandwich right now is the paper trail of a sandwich. Something nonspecific, even better, just a fat total at the bottom, he can tell them it records anything he wants it to. Within the elastic confines of reimbursable expenses, of course.
The receipt flutters and taunts. He is at Gate 22, at the mouth of Terminal B, and any one of the laden and harried pilgrims might be searching for the receipt at this very moment and contest his ownership should he in fact make his move. Witnesses at the counter. J. dislikes scenes. As if airport security would take his word over some middle-aged mom from Paramus. Pharmacy bin sunglasses hooked askew into the neck of her striped outlet T-shirt, her faded Cancun souvenir baseball cap, those taxpayer details, he’d have no chance.
This little boy in bright green robot gear, merchandise from whatever kids’ show is big now, contemplates the stray receipt just as intently as J. from across the walkway in the opposing camp of Gate 21, Flight 702 to Houston. He reckons the boy is waiting for one of the travelers to step on it, to relish that dinosaur foot carnage, and when this image occurs to J.—the receipt mangled by designer sneaker tread or so smudged that it would be useless to him—he immediately evacuates the plastic bucket seat, strides confidently out into the walkway with nary a guilty twitch, and after one quick glance back to make sure that no one is stealing his stuff, he bends down and grips the lonesome shaving between his thumb and index finger as gingerly as an entomologist stooping for a rare moth. No one raises a ruckus. The little boy sneers at him and performs a baroque martial arts move.
J.’s neck eases, his chin dips and he makes his blessing as he sits back down. For this is pure luck, a pristine receipt newly plucked from the great oak of consumption, and deserves a blessing. Airports bloom receipts as certainly as standing water bubbles up mosquitoes. He chides himself for waiting so long to pick it up. Why would anyone want it besides him? It is litter. Early afternoon in terminal city: most of these people are civilians, off visiting relatives or wherever normal people go, Disneyland. Not executives who will log every transaction on their corporate expense forms, and definitely not junketeers like him. No one was going to fight him over a receipt lost on the floor, tumbleweeding from gate to gate as footfall gusts urged it to some far corner. He feels foolish, but glad nonetheless that he still has his instincts. There is sure to be some hectic receipt wrangling over the next few days.
J. inspects his bounty. He brushes purple carpet fiber and a curlicue hair from the paper, runs his finger over the serration at its head. He makes a wish and scrutinizes. The printer of register #03 at Hiram’s News could use some new toner; only twenty minutes old and the receipt is already affecting a world-weary languor. Not a great haul, it won’t rank up there with the great found-receipt frauds he’s perpetrated over the years, certainly not another Planet Hollywood Paris or Prague ‘92, but still useful: one magazine and one item of candy, both identified only by strings of scanner numbers. J. makes the candy for chewing gum, puts the purchaser as a smoker in for a gnashing ride wherever he is going, but the magazine. Looking at three bucks and ninety-five cents, he puts his money on a perfume-packed lifestyle glossy: I’ll take something in a Condé Nast, please. DeAngelo Brothers Distribution has most of the Northeastern airports locked up and an agreement stipulates that Nast gets strong point-of-purchase display. He figures that on the expense form he’ll write down the magazine as research and slip the gum in as food. J. tucks the receipt in with the rest of the morning’s take, the cab and hotel receipts, and resumes listening to the airport announcements. He feels serene. He is a citizen of terminal city and he keeps every receipt in a chosen nook of his wallet and wayward receipts catch his eye from time to time.
It is safe in here. He watches his fellow shufflers queue before the gate attendants, who carve up the airplane cabin into certified tracts. This seems to him an orderly system, one of many in this concrete aviary. The giant brackets lulling the prefab sections of the terminal into peaceful aggregation, the charged and soothing simulated air, automatic flush urinals. He likes the new sound of cash registers, no more chimes: Instead this novel theater of validating purchases, the electronic scrying of purple ink across paper, that tiny pulse that reaches out to the network testing the credibility of credit cards. True, each foray through the metal detector still feels like a prison break and there is no stopping the animal jostling when boarding is announced or when the plane sidles up to the destination gate and all those grubby moist-toileted damp hands grope for the overhead compartment latches, but these are expressions of human weakness, no fault of the design of airports. J. locks his carry-on bag (he is allowed only one on this flight) between his heels. Even the cramped chaos of embarkation and debarkation can be overcome with the right attitude. People movers and white courtesy phones. Food in convenient trays. What the meals lack in taste, they compensate for in thoughtful packaging. He’s never found a human hair in airplane food. What else are plastic shells for. Iceberg lettuce contains important minerals. New advances in legroom, he’s noticed this in the last few months he has been a resident here. J. is confident that they (an air carrier coalition, squabbles checked at the door, this agenda before them) are dedicated to attacking certain essential problems and have platoons of ergonomists sequestered on a suburban campus working on the problem of legroom, circulation, the facts of biology versus the exigencies of cabin space, and that is why, even though the fruit of this work is difficult for the eye to discern, he has fewer leg cramps these days.
A gate attendant announces boarding and he waits for them to call his row. A gate attendant rips a large section from his boarding pass and he slips the remainder into his pocket as he walks down the chilly declivity to the loading door.
He forces his bag into the trim space beneath the seat in front of him as instructed. He is an aisle man, has been for years. Middle seat is a ham sandwich, and there is nothing to see out the reinforced windows, just the undigested blur of the nation. J. feels he works more efficiently if he does not think of his audience, where they live. He likes to keep his obligations to meeting the word count, a number readily verified by a feature on a pulldown menu of his word processing program.
People carefully push items into the overhead compartment only to have their thoughtful arrangements undone and encroached upon by other passengers. The flight attendants check the overhead compartments and latch them.
A plump white woman in a slim turquoise pantsuit informs him that she has been assigned the window seat. As he allows her room to pass, he composes in his mind an ad for her perfume that describes a versatile essence appropriate for both the office and evenings out. Then he places the scented ad on a page toward the front of the book, between the contributors’ notes and letters to the editor. She slides her leather briefcase beneath the seat in front of her and pulls down the shade. Her feathered red hair is as leveled as an ancient pagoda. In unison they fasten their seat belts.
It is a time of checking and rechecking of clasps and buckles and latches throughout the body of the plane, an assembly of minutiae that might make a liftoff.
He is always up in the air.
The woman in the window seat wins the first round by lifting the armrest that divides her seat and the middle seat into discreet pens. She folds her jacket in half and pats it down in the empty seat. Beats him to it. J. tells himself to wake up. He is going to need all of his skills this weekend; this woman is a civilian, a minnow compared to all those other pilot fish he’ll be competing with over the next few days.
J. watches the flight attendant nudge the metal cart up the aisle in the dot dot dash of cabin food dispensation. A snack flight, just a little jump south and east. He unlatches the food tray and slides his palms across its unblemished factory surface. The flight attendant smiles at this and deposits a square foil packet of snacks and a nonalcoholic beverage. He turns the package so that it is parallel to the edges of the tray and contemplates his lunch. Pretzel logs dusted with orange cheese flavor. The hotel this morning gave away doughnuts and coffee on a table near the registration desk, so that was one free meal he could easily categorize—even by the standards of normal people—as breakfast, and this is the second free meal of the day because another party had purchased his ticket, and then tonight there is some kind of opening-night banquet, free meal numero tres. He’ll count this package of pretzels as lunch and gorge himself on the buffet, it is sure to be a buffet, it always is, J. figures he can hold out that long. He can always hold out for a free meal. J. sucks the cheese dust and salt from the pretzels, dissolving these substances by rubbing them against the roof of his mouth before biting down into the pretzel proper. He sees the benevolent and nurturing crimson light of the heat lamp over prime rib, the cheerful blue fire of the sterno cans beneath the metal trays containing local produce. He wipes the orange residue into the cushion of his seat, which doubles as a flotation device if certain situations arise.
The woman in the window unlatches the tray of the middle seat, where she places her empty snack package and plastic glass. Round two, J. observes, flexing her might. Sending the gunboats to Cuba. She refastens her tray and after slow survey of her domain resigns herself to the unalloyed distraction of the airplane periodical.
The magazine contains, scattered among global itineraries and capsule descriptions of inflight movies, informative articles of sundry nature. A few years back J. landed a piece in there, an endorsement of new Zairian hotels; President Mobutu had been trying to rustle up some tourist traffic for that oft-overlooked country. J. observed no rivers of blood while there. It was a junketeer’s ball. Every slob on the List roused themselves for that one. Their credentials were never verified. Hepatitis a regular topic of conversation. Only J. was naive enough to actually write an article about the trip. He was green then, nervous about repercussions, clinging valiantly to an abstraction of journalistic ethics. The government flew in crates of liquor from Europe. He got two dollars a word and bought some new pants.
J. looks over the woman’s shoulder and notices Tiny’s byline on an article about the French Quarter of New Orleans. Fourth or fifth time the fucker has sold that story. At least—there are too many outlets these days for him to keep track of his own stories, let alone his comrades’. You have to admire Tiny’s nerve. A junketeer among junketeers. J. wonders if he bothered to change the lede this time. The woman notices J.’s attentions, scowls, and gestures toward him as if to remind J. that every seatback is stocked with the latest volume of the airline journal. His stomach gurgles in hunger.
After a time the flight attendant moseys up the aisle bearing a white plastic bag with a red drawstring slotted into its lip. Same kind he has at home, a convenient model that flatters his farsightedness whenever he purchases a box. J. deposits his trash and the trash from the middle tray into the bag. He returns his tray to the upright position. He almost shuts the middle tray too but then realizes that he may have trespassed by disposing of her trash. She had extended her zone to cover the empty seat fair and square. At least his armrests are uncontested. Just to make sure he grips them tightly. When the plane comes to rest at the gate, the woman grabs her briefcase and coat and shuffles toward him. His only revenge for her excellent gamesmanship during the flight is to sit still and patient as she fidgets beside him, her hand rapping her thigh and eyes prying open the overhead from afar. She is not going to move through him. J. stands when he is good and ready, when it is their row’s turn out of the bottleneck. I take it where I can get it, he says to himself.
Forget the South. The South will kill you. He possesses the standard amount of black Yankee scorn for the South, a studied disdain that attempts to make a callus of history. It manifests itself in various guises: sophisticated contempt, a healthy stock of white trash jokes, things of that nature, an instinctual stiffening to the words County Sheriff. One look at the cannibals massing at the arrival gate and his revulsion rubs its paws together and hisses. The faces are different: He always feels this fact keenly when he touches down in a place he has never been before. But on this occasion his dread expresses itself so forcefully that he has half a mind to scurry back up the ramp for the protection of his aisle seat. He has arrived at a different America he does not live in. The undiagnosed press toward the gate waiting for kin. Placed hip-to-hip, the rivulets and shadings of their acid-washed jeans describe a relief map of blighted confederacy. Powerline kids suck fingers. Between the hems of oversized shorts and lips of polyknit athletic socks sally bright red lobster flesh and craggy knees, dumb and unashamed things, sea-bottom tubers uncataloged by any known system of biological taxonomy. (None of this is true, of course, but perception is all; to and from each his own dark continent.) One man had fashioned his beard into a slim rattail, they all draw from the same tainted well, it is simply disturbing.
An image of the impending buffet shimmers in the air before him and his seizure subsides. He’s been to Atlanta a few times, but Atlanta is a chocolate city and he was never permitted to stray from the record companies’ publicity circuits. Covered Mardi Gras for the travel section of a daily in Des Moines, but felt protected in the prevailing madness of celebration, which creates pockets of safety and violence in equal measure. Stopovers in Texas but damned if he left the borders of terminal city. It is not difficult to indulge his preferences; media events tend to emerge near media centers and that means the coasts. He’s been very conscientious about staying away from the forge of his race’s history. And now here he is in Charleston, West Virginia, at the behest of the United States Postal Service and a smudge town called Talcott to cover the unveiling of a postage stamp, inertial, grubbing, hoarding receipts, because he is on a three-month junket jag he is too unwilling or too scared to break. He thinks, these people are liable to eat me.
J. searches for his name in crayon on a slab of cardboard but cannot find his driver at the gate or at baggage claim. Nice summer day: the man is probably down at the fishing hole. Or rocking in a frayed hammock. He decides to wait outside.
Hubbub of vehicles at the curb. He doesn’t have much choice other than to wait. He has no idea where he is going. Yeager Airport, named after Brigadier General Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager, or so he reads on a well-polished bronze plaque. Chuck Yeager is a native son. No wonder he took flight. J. waits for his driver to pull up in a red pickup with a bunch of chickens in the back spitting feathers.
In the passenger loading and unloading zone the carbon monoxide, so terrible after the careful atmosphere of the terminal, hangs low around his heels, heavier than air. A gang of dirty clouds loiters over there. J. says, “What a dump,” and for the second time that day he blesses the certainty of airports because he can always turn around and go someplace else.
United States Postal Service — Postal News For Immediate Release
June 6, 1996
American Folk Hero Comes to Life in Stamp Series
WASHINGTON—One of America’s best-loved folk heroes will come to life this summer when the town of Talcott, West Virginia, holds the first annual “John Henry Days” festival, which will coincide with release of the U.S. Postal Service’s Folk Heroes stamp series. Since the 1870s, John Henry has been extolled as a strongman born with a hammer in his hands and the ability to drive steel for ten continuous hours. It is said that while working for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad on the Big Bend Tunnel just outside Talcott, John Henry challenged a steam drill to a race and swung his hammers so hard that he beat the machine. Railroad workers who arduously labored during the building of the nation’s rail system literally sang the praises of this hero.
The town of Talcott is pleased to honor one of its famous residents. On the weekend of July 12, 1996, the town will host the inaugural “John Henry Days” festival, a three-day celebration of railroad history and local culture. Representatives of the United States Postal Service will be on hand for the official unveiling of the Folk Heroes stamp series, and many surprise guests and activities have been scheduled. “Folk heroes like John Henry represent the best of American values,” said Postmaster General Marvin Runyon. “The U.S. Postal Service is proud to continue their tales through our commemorative stamp series.”
Joining John Henry on the Folk Heroes series are Paul Bunyan, Mighty Casey and Pecos Bill. Paul Bunyan, according to lore, was a giant lumberjack who journeyed the country with Babe, the Blue Ox, clearing trees. Bunyan was a hero to legions of lumberjacks, who spun yarns about Bunyan clearing acres of outsized trees and employing legions of loggers from across the continent. Generations of children have heard the classic “Casey at the Bat,” which first appeared in the San Francisco Examiner in 1888. Written by Ernest Lawrence Thayer and popularized by William DeWolf Hopper, that ballad relates the story of an arrogant young baseball player who strikes out at bat, causing his team to lose an important game. Since his original tale appeared in Century Magazine in 1923, Pecos Bill and his mastery of the American frontier have been a part of our national lore. Legend contends that this folk hero was raised by a coyote and was rugged enough to ride a mountain lion and commandeer a rattlesnake as a lasso.
The stamps were designed by artist Dave La Fleur of Derby, Kansas, and will be available nationwide beginning July 15. “The folk heroes are illustrated exactly as in at least one written version of their tales,” said stamp artist La Fleur. “Each hero’s most memorable moment is depicted: Casey just before he swings his bat, John Henry wielding his hammer, Paul Bunyan his ax, and Pecos Bill his rattlesnake.”
The Postal Service will issue 113 million Folk Heroes series stamps in panes of twenty stamps. Each pane will sell for $6.40.
A special reception for members of the media will be held on Friday, July 12, at the historic Millhouse Inn. Accommodations will be arranged. If you plan to attend this event, please contact Arlene at the Summers County Visitors Center.
J. sits in the backseat of an (#ulink_c76ba4ab-5eee-5b50-a6f1-9d275cde49c8) American car of recent vintage. Jesus Christ hangs from the rearview mirror and shakes at every turn as if trying to wiggle His crucifix from the ground. Arnie apologizes again for being late to pick up J. at the airport.
J. says no problem. He looks out the back window and returns to his activity of the past ten minutes, a cool contemplation of the eighteen-wheeler chasing their rear bumper. A plastic sheet detailing the Confederate flag dominates the truck’s front grille. He can’t see the driver but he waves hello to the black window and turns. Around him the outlands of the city of Charleston, clumps of industrial parks and jumbo shopping centers and entire new species of parking lot, recede into the countryside. There is the problem of horizontal space. In the distance J. sees mountains, insurgent green lids peering over the rim of the world, whenever the smaller peaks the road cleaves through allow him to see that far. Did the settlers ever think they’d get past these slopes, J. asks himself. Cross an ocean, they make it this far into the land and worry that the whole place is like this: a concatenation of cliffs and banks, as if some hobgoblin roosting on the other side of the hills had shoved up the earth. Like a giant kicking a bunch of green carpet. Hearty folk, the mountain people.
“Do you mind if I take the back roads?” Arnie asks. He gestures at the lane ahead, the congealing traffic. “They close it up to one lane a couple of miles ahead. For construction. It might take the same time, but it won’t take longer.”
“You know the way,” J. answers. With a little luck, the monster vehicle behind them won’t follow. J. puts Arnie in his forties, paying alimony and owning his cab after years of scrimping, part of the far-flung fleet of New River Gorge Taxi. Fleet, as in two or three rheumy vehicles. Arnie’s straw hair thins and golden stubble sprouts from his chin. Eats what he catches. The interior of the car smells, not unpleasantly, of the better class of urinal cake.
“So,” Arnie clears his throat, “what are you, with the Post Office?”
“I’m a journalist.”
“Writing an article about the festival?”
“That’s right.”
Arnie asks him if he writes for newspapers and magazines and J. says yeah, even though this particular piece is for a new travel website. J. doesn’t feel like explaining the web; this guy probably thinks a laptop is some new kind of banjo. Lucien set it up. J. hasn’t worked for the web before but knew it was only a matter of time: new media is welfare for the middle class. A year ago the web didn’t exist, and now J. has several hitherto unemployable acquaintances who were now picking up steady paychecks because of it. Fewer people are home in the afternoon eager to discuss what transpires on talk shows and cartoons and this means people are working. It was only a matter of time before those errant corporate dollars blew his way. He attracts that kind of weather.
J. checks the receipt nook in his wallet again, just to make sure. He makes a concerted effort to enjoy the scenery. It is hard: all trees look alike to him. The route slips between the places the government blasted through, the hills, and the scarred rock faces stare at each other from the sides of the road, grim, still grudgeful after all these years at their sunderance. Water trickles down the rock from unknown springs, high up springs, who knows what, this is nature, down the slopes, across the roots of intrepid trees, and wets the rock faces like perspiration on the brow of a boxer. The driver is taking J. deep in. Off the interstate. He is being taken in. Lucien set the gig up when J. called and expressed his serious doubts as to whether he could place a story about a fucking stamp. It was mostly a philosophical problem; they don’t have to write about all the various events they attend, just enough to keep from looking like complete hacks. No one wants the game to be exposed, not the junketeers and not the p.r. folks who set the itineraries. Most of the time it is enough to pull out a notebook and scribble for appearance’s sake, in between passes at the hors d’oeuvres table. After a couple of years, J. has learned to only write up the events where the number of expenses and the dollar-per-word bounty make coasting prohibitive. There are never any repercussions. Publicists continue to greet him warmly and hand out press material that remains unopened, he carries away promotional items by the bushel, he eats and drinks his fill. He remains on the List.
But this stamp problem. This stamp gig was so unusual, J. put it to Lucien as a kind of challenge: who in the world would possibly care about this event? What magazine employed copy editors who could bear to touch a comma of such a piece, what newspaper had a readership that consisted entirely of drooling and defenseless shut-ins? They’d been in rough straits before, Lucien and his journalist allies, but always came through in the end if they had to, placed the piece about Ronald McDonald’s rap record (open-faced filet mignon burgers and chocolate margarita shakes at the press party), found the sympathetic editor who had column space for the plastic surgeon who specialized in Hollywood kindergartens (everyone who attended the press conference got a free estimate and a computer-generated hypothetical face to take home with them). But a postage stamp? It seemed ridiculous even by their degraded standards. In West Virginia yet. J. just wanted to know if the world had progressed to a point where such a thing was possible. He just wanted to know.
Lucien was calm and patient. He gave a little speech. He told J. to stick around his hotel room for a few minutes. A few minutes later the features editor of Time Warner’s travel website rang and said he was thinking of running a piece on the Talcott celebration and would J. be interested. Like that.
Now the road dives between peaks, past towns persistent beyond the defeat of founding father ambition. The speckling of quiet houses and rusted trucks draws itself from the muck and develops a culture and evolves into strip malls, bright knots of gas stations and fast food outlets, before collapsing again into a barbarism of shacks and rusted trucks. The strip malls are reaching for perfection. Each time they enter into the outlands of a new strip mall, J. wonders if this time the franchisees and maverick entrepreneurs will get it right, if this time the ratios are correct and density, placement, brand will configure a new and final product. One beautiful single product with acreage and registers, with multiple fire exits and convenient business hours. But each creation is botched and maladjusted, it will not play with the other kids or has a morbid disposition, and subsides, inevitably, into the silence of black country road. And soon the strip malls disappear altogether and J. will see a sign for a town, and one or two lone houses jammed into hillside accelerate into a cluster of abodes and then thin out again. Presently he’ll see the sign for the next town, all without ever passing what passes for a town in his definition. Not even a store beyond a gas station. He is confused.
Arnie says, “Nice and peaceful. Sure beats the city, huh?” Having assumed correctly that J. is not a son of the South.
“It certainly is green,” J. says.
“First time in West Virginia?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re going to like it,” Arnie assures. “‘The most northern of the southern, the most southern of the northern, the most western of the eastern, and the most eastern of the western.’ That’s what they say, and I can vouch for it. We’ve got everything here. Skiing in Beckley a good part of the year. If you get a chance over the weekend, you should check out the river. They have all sorts of white water rafting trips you can take.”
“I’m not much of a water person,” J. says. Which puts an end to the bumpkin patter for a while.
Content everlasting. The man at the website, sounded like a young guy, said they were looking for content. The website is set to launch in a few weeks. Eventually they want it to have a global aspect, but for the start they are focusing on gathering a lot of regional content. That way they pull in local advertisers, he explained. J. could hear computer keys tapping through the receiver. Time Warner is putting a lot of money into the launch, the man informed him. They want to make a big splash. He invited J. to the launch party, if J. was going to be in town. J. knew he was already invited; Time Warner is a mainstay of the List. All J. can think is content. It sounds so honest. Not stories, not articles, but content. Like it is a mineral. It is so honest of them.
Arnie and J. have been on small roads for over half an hour now, dancing along curved blacktop, past slide areas and deer crossings. The driver makes another attempt at conversation: “When I heard your name, I thought, Sutter, huh? Sounds like a Southern name.”
“Maybe my ancestors were owned down here at some point.”
“Maybe …?”Arnie meets J.’s eyes in the rearview mirror and chuckles. “That’s funny. You’re funny.” He starts to hum.
The light gives after a series of turns as the trees huddle together and snatch at the afternoon. There are no other cars on the road. Each time they clear one forbidding encroachment of hills, more livid peaks keep the car closed in. Arnie hums and taps his fingers on the steering wheel. This burp of paranoia: what if Caleb here is driving him up into the mountains, down to the creek, out to the lonesome spot where his family performs rituals. Boil him up in a pot, ritual sacrifice helps the crops grow. J. peers over the front seat waiting for the tree line to break. Taking the back roads indeed. After a few days the FBI will verify that he was on the flight to Yeager Airport, the woman in the window seat provides unenthusiastic affirmation, but after that no trail. Arnie’s cousin the local constable. Maybe not even after a few days. No one knows where he is any more than he does. His editor will just think he flaked out on the assignment. Notorious tendency of freelancers to disappear near a deadline. Boil him up in a pot while they watch wrestling on TV. He figures even the most remote shack has a TV these days. The cable carrier in this region serves a special clientele, entire public access shows devoted to dark meat recipes.
As a joke, J. almost says, “So what do you do around here for fun?” but thinks better of it. I’m a real city boy, J. thinks, I’m a real jaded fuck. Eventually they clear the woods, passing first an unattended stand of native arts and crafts that seems not to have been open for some time, then a gas station and garage with a rogues gallery of cars and pickups in its lot. Arnie says they are getting close.
Content is king, they say. Rape and pillage time for the junketeer willing to put in the time to make the contacts. A whole new scale.
“This is Hinton,” Arnie says. They had rounded a turn and now came across the biggest settlement in some time. Hinton is dropped down in the middle of a valley, a marble cupped by monstrous green hands. The car is separated from the town by the murky gray river that carved the valley; J. sees the low bridge that would have taken them into Hinton if they had turned left. A flat section of the town groups along the opposite bank, he spies a shopping center and above it the buildings inch up the mountain wall, thinning, a scattering of two- and three-story buildings that are probably the original town: old and distinguished structures. Arnie doesn’t turn left. Arnie takes him right, away and parallel from the town, down the road that creeps along the river. A strip of small establishments perch on this side of the bank, a souvenir taxidermy shop, the Coast to Coast motel. Herb’s Country Style promises chicken fried steak. Between the stores, J. can make out the other half of Hinton across the river, lurking among trees like a fugitive.
Arnie has stopped humming. “I usually only work Mondays and Tuesdays,” he says, “but the festival is paying us almost double what we usually get. You staying at the Motor Lodge?”
“I’m not sure. If that’s what they told you.”
“Well, they said the Motor Lodge, so that’s where I’m going to take you. If it turns out that’s not where you’re supposed to be, I’ll wait around and take you to wherever you’re supposed to be. How’s that sound? We can go to Saskatchewan, I don’t care.” Arnie is flexible, apparently. “I heard Ben Vereen was coming. Is that true?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I love Ben Vereen,” Arnie says. “This is shaping up to be some big party. Saying after a few years it could be bigger than the Nicholas County Spud and Splinter Festival. Good for the whole area.” Up ahead J. sees the river jump out of a gigantic dam in exuberant streams, like hair through a comb, but they veer away from it; Arnie turns left across a black bridge that takes them over the rolling water. “Talcott’s about ten miles on,” Arnie continues. “That’s where John Henry’s from. But we’re not going that far. Talcott’s pretty small, so I guess that’s why most of the stuff this weekend is being organized in Hinton. They’re like sisters.”
Past the bridge the road is unpopulated again. The road follows another branch of the river and J. looks down into tenebrous water. Trees march down right into the current and J. pictures a whole forest under the dark water, what existed before the dam raised the river. Maybe even a whole town sleeping under there. He wonders if the newspaper of the drowned town needs freelancers.
Arnie turns at a tall clapboard sign announcing the Talcott Motor Lodge. The sign has been recently repainted. He pulls up to the front door of the main building, a squat red structure with a tin roof. A statue of a railroad engineer tips its hat to all who pass.
“Here we are,” Arnie says.
J. asks for a receipt.
After the killing is over, after the (#ulink_ea88d333-d2f6-552c-9d6c-e4d7076a1421) gunman has slid to the ground, after the gun smoke has dissipated into the invisible, the witnesses rouse themselves into this world again, find themselves waking in warm huddles reinforcing each other’s humanity; they blink at their surroundings to squeeze violence from their eyes. Some gather their wits more quickly and run for help. A few possess a small measure of medical expertise and tend to the dying and shout reassuring words that are as much for the wounded as for themselves. There is a magnetism of families and friends, they are drawn together and inspect each other’s bodies for damage. The witnesses thank God. The witnesses share what they have seen and fit their perspectives into one narrative through a system of sobbing barter. In these first few minutes a thousand different stories collide; this making of truth is violence too, out of which facts are formed.
Facts are Joan Acorn’s trade this summer. She has recovered her purse and notepad but cannot find her pen. It is suddenly the most important thing in her life that she recover her pen. It’s a Bic. She thinks she must have sent it flying when she heard the first shot and dropped to the prone position described by the personal security consultant her sorority retained to teach them about self-defense. Keep low, he said, and recited statistics about driveby shootings in the ghetto. As she looked up at him from the couch in the living room of her sorority house, Joan imagined him as the kind of man who instructed the ROTC guys in military lore. He was really butch. Joan found him sexy. He knew how to tell people things so they remained in their consciousness. The consultant enjoyed a vogue on her campus, he was a prophet of anticrime come to deliver them from the rape scare. When she heard the first shot Joan dropped between the folding chairs and sent her pen flying.
She sees her pen a few yards away, next to someone’s lost sandal. A new wave of screaming starts; a new realization of what has happened thrashes around in traumatized skulls. Joan struggles to do what any journalist would do in this situation. The final event of John Henry Days was her first assignment, it turned out differently than expected, and she remembers instructions from last semester’s Intro Journalism class. She crammed late-night in her pajamas with a friend, deciphering her lecture notes for the final and dropping microwave popcorn. Joan is single-minded. She navigates through the overturned chairs. Everything is so bright. People congregate in groups and pat each other’s bodies. They dangle and sag. She makes her way to the sidewalk. Cars are hum still in the street, their doors open and mysterious and full of tales. It reminds her of a nuclear war movie.
She approaches an older couple dressed in identical green and red jogging suits. She identifies herself as a writer for the Charleston Daily Mail and asks them what they have seen. The witnesses point up to the bandstand. The witnesses point to the groups ministering to the dying. She canvasses the witnesses and tries to get the story. When Joan gets to the telephone outside the barbershop she tries to remember her parents’ calling card number and has a little bit of difficulty.
Joan gets through to the editorial desk and informs a man about the killing spree. She sees a tan police car enter the square. Her use of the words killing spree is questioned by the man working the Sunday slot, who asks her to identify herself and slow down. Joan is the intern for the Life section of the Charleston Daily Mail. She had been very excited early in the spring that she might get the chance to write about fashion, a desire she expressed to her parents during their Sunday evening phone call. Her father got on the phone to her uncle. Her uncle, a successful lawyer who had many influential friends, got on the horn to the sales director of the Charleston Daily Mail, who made calls of his own. Then disaster struck. Around April Joan discovered that her three best friends were going to travel in Europe for the summer. Joan fumed; she wished they had told her earlier, they were supposed to be best friends. But she had already given her word committing to the internship and her parents told her that to back out would make her look irresponsible. In addition, they had paid for her trip to Europe the summer before and did not want to spoil her. A compromise in the form of a new car to facilitate her commute between home and office restored the family to its customary state of goodwill.
Joan tries to slow down on the phone. The slot man tells her to just slow down and tell him what happened exactly. For a second, the men standing over the journalist part and she can see his bloody chest and slack mouth. The sales director of the Charleston Daily Mail took her out to lunch the first day of her internship and described the history and traditions of the paper, pantomiming certain key moments with his hairy fingers. Joan’s duties include opening mail, calling for art, and taking messages. There are occasional perks. One time the film editor said, anyone want a pass to a movie, and Joan took her best friend from childhood. In the movie they sat next to a beautiful news anchorman who had been on television for years and years. She made the best of things. Joan told her friends from high school, amid the silences that made apparent the divergent tacking of their lives, that she was going to write for the Daily Mail, but in fact she had little success convincing her boss of her specialness. The editor of the Life section does not seem fashionable or hip. He had been trapped by benefits and union security some years before. He is grizzled and has seen interns come and go, but Joan is an expert nagger. She is pert and brunette. In an impulse of inspired cruelty, he assigned her to write two hundred words on the stamp ceremony, to teach her about the dues all journalists must pay, no matter who their friends are. Joan was delighted and rose early Sunday morning and drove the fifty miles from Charleston to Talcott in her new car, which was equipped with a CD player.
The Sunday slot man reiterates his instructions to Joan. Just tell him slowly what happened. She perceives a stiffening in the postures of the men tending to one of the wounded and takes this as an indication of his worsening condition. She begins to cry. She cannot get the words to the slot man. She thinks, where, what, who, these are the essential questions a journalist must ask herself. And then Joan feels a warmth in her chest and she says in someone else’s voice, “Talcott, West Virginia—A postal worker opened fire Sunday afternoon on a crowd of people gathered for the unveiling of a new postage stamp; critically wounding three people before being shot and killed.”
Dave Brown’s byline is a roach whose (#ulink_1b63e6e9-34e7-5e8f-970d-f98b655d9a2d) gradual infestation of the world’s print media can only be sketchily documented. First sightings of the scourge can be traced to the late 1960s; numerous samples of the creature’s spoor have been collected from the concert reviews section of Crawdaddy. The counterculture, it is hypothesized, proved an abundant food source for the emergent insect, which seemed to thrive on the scraps of the new pop culture, insinuating itself behind the baseboards of Rolling Stone and beneath the refrigerators of alternative weeklies. The organism traveled to new publishing empires by stowing away in the cargo holds of spectacle, a survival instinct that served it well in the following decade when a threefold increase in the number of print venues provided ample nesting opportunities. This moist, expanding media proved an exceptionally favorable environment for the byline and its appearances grew at an exponential rate. It has been observed crawling above a prison interview with Sirhan Sirhan in Playboy and lazily breeding in the New York Times during the heyday of singer-songwriters. Stubborn and tenacious, the byline was able to sustain itself through climatic changes in editorial style, its reproductive cycle seemingly unaffected by the insufferable aridity of the Reagan years. Today, no newsstand remains uninfested by Dave Brown’s byline and its readily identifiable, unadorned, service-oriented prose.
On the afternoon of July 12, 1996, Dave Brown sits in the parking lot of the Talcott Motor Lodge in a beach chair, legs ajar, sunning his face with the optimistic silver of a tanning shield. He wears faded army cutoffs and bright red designer sneakers. His gray, untied shoelaces look as if they have been chewed. Dave nods at J. and gestures toward his thermos. “You want a drink?”
“What is it?”
“Gin and tonic.”
J. shakes his head and drops his bags. He looks down at his key and searches for his room number on the rows of the motel behind him. The green motel building lounges low and fat; its two floors are stacked atop each other like two worms engaged in sexual congress. J. feels a few beads of sweat pop out from his underarms. “How long have you been here?” he asks, eyes tracing green ridges.
“I got in about an hour ago,” Dave says, his head still tilted up to the sun. “Only flight I could get. I think we’re the first ones here.”
J. looks back at the hotel rooms. He asks Dave if he knows which of their fellow mercenaries will be attending the weekend’s events.
“Beats me,” Dave replies. “It’s kind of a bum gig, and those are the ones where you never know who’s going to show up. Frenchie I know, because I saw him at the Esquire thing last week and he said he was coming. Probably Tiny because he likes Southern food.” He takes off his sunglasses and shakes his head. “I’m just here because I figured I’d kill some time before I head to L.A. for the TV press tour. Charleston seemed like a nice way station in between there and New York. Get some country air and that shit. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
J. shifts on his feet. His stomach complains again. “What’s the buzz on the buffet?”
“I haven’t heard anything yet. Local culture, hard to say. But then you gotta factor in the U.S. Post Office and you never know with government food. Sure you don’t want a drink?”
“What time is it?”
“It’s about four-thirty.”
J. walks to the dry swimming pool, which looks like something he left soaking in his sink, a dirty pot caked with burnt leaves and grit. No lifeguard on duty. He drags over a beach chair, scraping flint, while Dave tips the thermos into a styrofoam cup and drops in some motel ice. J. takes a long sip and the buzzing in his head argues once more for his hunger. Dave Brown makes formidable gin and tonics. They sit and gossip for a few minutes about who they’ve seen at the last few events, discuss how the List always gets weird in the summer, thin and gawky, as the entertainment combine gears up for the fall. Everyone is in the Hamptons. L.A. keeps plugging along of course, in fact the last time J. saw Dave was at a summer blockbuster dog-and-pony show just before Memorial Day. Guns and car crashes keep everyone fed. The studio marketing people watched happily as hors d’oeuvre toothpicks were licked clean and abandoned on linen tablecloths. Travel pieces for fall publication sent the junketeers scrambling for malaria pills and sunblock. But then there are weird events like this one, odd meteors. J. feels a pain in his arm and slaps a mosquito into a bloody skid. Out in the country. This is a real die-hard gig if Dave, Tiny, and Frenchie are showing up. Which, J. observes, makes him a die-hard junketeer. Dave slathers some suntan lotion into his chest hair. Dave, the oldest one of them all, probably the first name on the List. No one knows for sure who conceived of the List, one or two prime suspects remain unconfirmed, but at a certain point the List required an inspiration, some muse of mooching, and no doubt it had to be Dave. The mastermind of the List sees Dave at a Battle of the Network Stars gala in the late seventies and is granted a vision. Dave with his oversized head screwed into a gnome’s body, in his trademark president-for-life khaki jacket, with bulging pockets overflowing but never touched in public. He has pockets for his pockets. Survival gear: a compass with the open bar at due north, waterproof pens, jungle rot remedies and prescription-strength antacid. The mastermind of the List sees Dave, notes the inclination of the free drink in his hand and the next day his secretary is fathoms deep in his rolodex and recovering the names.
Dave digs into the motel ice bucket and freshens his drink. “So, J.,” he begins, “word is you’re going for the record.” Mixing the ice cubes with his finger.
“Nah, I’m just on a jag.”
“Really? How long have you been on this so-called jag, J.? Been pretty active.”
“It’s been about three months. Mid-April. I started with the Barbie thing.” Mattel introduced its latest Barbie at an all-night party in FAO Schwarz. The new Barbie came with a Range Rover and vaginal cleft; J. and Monica the Publicist groped each other while miniature robot tanks circled their feet.
“I was there,” Dave says, nodding. “A very elegant sushi spread.”
“That’s the one. Since then.”
“Not bad. Nonstop? Moving around or just sticking around New York?” The implication being that it is fairly easy for one of their number to hit a press conference every day, score a doughnut or two, and split. If J.’s streak consists primarily of easy scores, his feat is unspectacular and quite possibly indicative of poor breeding.
“I’ve been pretty mobile,” J. says. “I was in L.A. for two weeks for the blockbuster tour, but that’s the most I was in one place and I’ve hit an event every day. I’m on a jag.”
“Two weeks is a jag, three months is a binge.” He winks, a sprightly flutter he had toiled on for days one dead summer in 1979. “Sure you’re not going for the record?” he asks again. “Because if you’ve been junketeering that long nonstop, you’ve got a good start on the record.”
“I don’t want to be another Bobby Figgis,” J. says. He is pretty dizzy from the gin and tonic; formerly a vile slick in his stomach, the drink has organized itself into an octopus-like creature that tugs and twists his insides.
“Nobody wants to be another Bobby Figgis. Just putting it out there. Let me tell you a story,” Dave says. J. offers no resistance. “One time I was at this book party for Norman Mailer. I don’t know which one, one of those goddamn things of his. I think I was going to review it for Rolling Stone. Or maybe I was just there, I can’t remember—I reviewed one of his books for Rolling Stone, anyway. Or was it People? It’s getting late and they’ve stopped bringing out the food so I’m stocking up on vittles. It was a nice spread. I had to reach over Capote, who was flailing his little rat paws in my way trying to block me. Are you with me?”
“You’re in an hors d’oeuvre war with a drunken dwarf.” It is a common enough occurrence in their line of business.
“We were two drunken dwarves trying to get in our God-given fill,” Dave continues. “Bianca Jagger flirted with me. Coke was dirt cheap that year so you couldn’t even get into the bathroom, even if you had to take a piss. You would have been home in your Star Wars pajamas. So George Plimpton comes up to me and says, ‘Do you like Peking roast duck?’ ‘Do you like the Peking roast duck?’ I look up at him. He’s talking to me in that New England accent of his, like he was chipped off fucking Plymouth Rock. He says, ‘Do you like the Peking roast duck?’ and he goes off on this detailed story about the history of the dish and the special ovens they use and how in China they used to keep the royal ducks in this nice open area and feed them the best rice and grain. It gives the ducks a special flavor. It’s like they’re spicing them up before they’re even dead. Only they—the ducks that is—think they’re the king of the hill. The landed gentry of, what is it, the mallard family, the royalty who get the best food and have the best duck lifestyle. They sneer at the peasant ducks outside the gate. Plimpton’s all spitting on me and grabbing for the duck on the table while he’s telling me this story. But what they don’t know, he says, he’s stabbing a cracker in my eye, is that they’re no better than the other ducks. They’re all going to get eaten. It’s just that some ducks get the better rice.”
“That’s a great story.”
“Isn’t it? Then he runs off to some other fab person in the room. And you know what the funny thing was? I’d never met him before. He called me by my name but he’d never met me before. It’s a fucking mystery to this day. It’s a fucking mystery.”
“This is a parable of some sort.”
“It’s a tale told throughout the ages. You want a refill?”
J. excuses himself. He grabs his bags and discovers room 27 halfway down the second floor of the motel. He hears a car door slam. Another arrival. Sarcophagal air escapes from the room when he opens the door; he will swear to that. The room is a maroon slab. First thing, J. checks out the TV and finds it receives the standard array of channels. He smells wet cement. He sits down on the bedspread, a ribbed crimson sheath that looks like it has been used to drag for bait. Across the room, a faded print describes a railroad man squatting on the roof of a caboose, angry canyon walls receding behind him, his hand waving his cap in the air above his snarl of joy. Jesus Christ. J.’s stomach surges and he runs to the bathroom and vomits.
Benny waits for gravel to become hail (#ulink_7fd6cd42-fdef-5b7e-9cf1-dcc320dbbfb7). The sound means a guest needs a room. The highway coughs up people. It is a great and unknowable sea. Benny keeps them warm, if the heaters are working.
He walked the property that morning to make sure everything was ready. Josie was still asleep. His wife had earned an extra hour or two after all the work they’d done on the place the last few weeks. Benny ran his hands along the gutters and grabbed leaves, half-born insects. The ladder creaked beneath him and reminded him of his weight, or rather the increase in his weight. When Benny got nervous the food stuck to him. He didn’t eat more, but the food stuck more. This nervousness then tipped into worry, because he didn’t like to buy new clothes, and this in turn dispatched him to the public library, where he checked out books on the human metabolism. As he returned to the office, he stopped to obliterate with his shoe an anthill that had burst from the dirt, messy and teeming, overnight.
In room 14, Pamela Street thinks about her father.
Benny sits in the leather chair behind the registration desk. Out of habit he reaches over to the little stand but it is not there. He moved the TV into the back office, away from the front, because he wanted to make a good impression on his guests. He has nothing—not the afternoon movie, no soap—to occupy him now except his waiting. Benny feels something in his thinning hair and withdraws a twig that has snared a few precious strands. Removing them from the twig, he squints at the pearl knobs of the follicles. Three more down.
Benny and Josie had spent the better part of a month getting their humble inn up to muster. They repainted the rooms and defrosted the workhorse half-fridges, opened up a new case of sanitized glasses and deposited vials of miracle shampoo-conditioner on the shower ledges. It was a time of woe for mildew. He and Josie laid new carpet, they went down on their knees and into the silverfish. As Benny waits in the office, vacantly eyeing the sports scores, he hopes that all the reservations actually show; he borrowed money from the bank in Hinton to pay for all the improvements. If all the reservations arrive, it will be the first time he and Josie have reached full occupancy. The only time the No in the Vacancy sign had ever been illuminated was when Benny and Josie went to Acapulco for six days and seven nights for their wedding anniversary. To compensate for their venture’s lack of history, Josie arbitrarily declares certain rooms Honeymoon Suites or haunted, but often forgets which is which, and sometimes she places a happy couple in a room with the ghost and is sick about it all night. Benny has had to restrain her physically from knocking on doors at 3 A.M. and telling guests to move two doors down.
Things have picked up in the last few years on account of the growing popularity of the dam and the lake. The Sandman and Coast to Coast gather most of the river traffic because they are closer to Hinton, but Benny and Josie catch their overflow. Strategically placed signs every quarter of a mile lure and tease. Local teens like to shoot buckshot at them. The Talcott Motor Lodge is a cozy budget motel off Route 3, but still proximate enough to the sights that tourists think that by staying there they are making some ingenious decision, distinguishing themselves from the other loudmouths of the tourist fray. The summer people swagger into the office damp and tired, sunburned and drained, tracking sand through the carpet. Always that detail: Benny imagines the grains jumping like fleas from the battlements of sneaker treads. The sand collects stubbornly between the bathroom tile, its sects flourish unpersecuted under carpet cover. The families are noise and the kids chase each other around the pool and slip and he can smell the litigation like coming rain. (He remembers then that he has forgotten to fill the pool, but it is too late to do anything about it, some of the guests have already arrived.) They demand amenities he and Josie cannot possibly provide. They are numerous and crack up the gravel in steady numbers, but he has never filled the place. Today, their place has advance reservations for every single room.
In room 29, Lawrence Flittings sits nude on the bed rubbing scented oils into his skin. It is a ritual he performs near the full moon that makes him feel more comfortable in his body.
In room 12, Alphonse Miggs brushes his finger along the bottom of the bathtub and contemplates the residue of abrasive cleanser powdering his fingertip.
Benny doesn’t like the new posters. The Chamber of Commerce delivered the John Henry posters last week and he removed some of the pictures of the New River Gorge—a laughing family on a raft, the great Gorge Bridge striding across angry water—from the reception area as instructed. After staring at them over the last few days, his initial reaction has not changed. Benny finds the festival posters a little too garish. He is in the spirit of things; it is difficult to remain unmoved by the optimism of the town, and there’s a good chance the events of the next few days will yield regular guests for his rooms in the long run. When Jack Cliff ran into him on the street and asked him if he was on board, Benny said, looking forward to it, Jack. But the posters seem so violent to him. The flashing sparks and sweat, John Henry’s heaving black body. Josie loves them of course; they are typical of the town’s railroad romance. Can’t sit in a bar for ten minutes without some Joe going on about how their engineer grandfather did this or that. The wreck of old something or other. It isn’t so glorious to Benny. The towns around here wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for the C&O, but a lot of people died laying track through the mountain. The cave-ins and dynamite. His neighbors, his wife, love all those violent stories. And for what. Look at it now. It’s Amtrak, its CXS Transportation hauling crap from coast to coast. That’s what he has to fight back saying ten times a day. It’s just Amtrak.
In room 17, Dave Brown cleans out his thermos.
In room 27, J. Sutter sleeps and dreams of a blizzard of receipts, a million fluttering tallies that he captures on his tongue.
Benny looks at his rack of room keys, remembers screwing the hooks into the plasterboard. Each hook is a room and all the people who will stay there for a time. Lives converge on those hooks.
This weekend is going to be good for the town: that phrase is the going rate. Before his retirement, Josie’s father had been a station man in Hinton for thirty years. They are railroad towns, Hinton and Talcott, and everybody who lives here has railroad in their bloodline. Not so Benny, whose family moved to Talcott when he was a teenager for reasons he still does not understand. He feels out of place when confronted with the railroad nostalgia of the two towns, that is to say nearly every waking moment. But as he waits for the next guest to arrive, he thinks perhaps he is learning to understand the mythology of his adopted home. He is learning what it is to wait for a train.
No one, it seems, wants to go (#ulink_a7c6933e-545f-5175-ae02-45f248e4b4ee) to West Virginia. West Virginia contains many natural wonders. The New River Gorge is spectacular. A number of the bituminous coal concerns have informative tours and dioramas for the curious visitor. The historic stand at Harpers Ferry, to name another thing. And yet. Just last week at a bar on M Street in Washington, D.C., an inquisitive patron could have overheard this conversation between two postal employees:
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
Pittsburgh I wouldn’t mind. It’s a big city. I have a college roommate in Pittsburgh.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
I don’t know why they picked John Henry in the first place.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
You know. They got three white ones, you gotta mix it up these days. Nothing against John Henry. I just wish he was from somewhere else.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan—who’s the other guy?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
Mighty Casey.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
(sipping lager)
“Casey at the Bat.” I don’t even know who Pecos Bill is.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
(gritting his teeth)
Nobody knows who the fuck Pecos Bill is. He wrestled a rattlesnake.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
You got Babe the Blue Ox in the Paul Bunyan one?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
That’s exactly what I said. What’s Paul Bunyan without Babe the Blue Ox? But we just did an animal series a few months ago.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
(nodding ruefully)
To take care of the animal lovers. We don’t want to alienate that segment of stamp consumers. Not in Marvin Runyon’s Post Office. Whose idea was this anyway for a Folk Hero series?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
Who do you think?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Yeah.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
(shaking his head)
And he wants some target marketing people to go along. You know his big thing now. I don’t know why it has to be me, but there you have it. I know the beds are going to kill me. I can feel that already. My back is fucking killing me already. It’s enough to make me go—
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
(looking over his shoulder)
Don’t say it!
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say, go nuts. I actually talked to the son of a bitch mayor of the town. We got a registered letter from the Chamber of Commerce. They sent a registered letter to the Post Office like it’s some kind of threat. The Post Office! They go, “Pittsburgh may be Steeltown U.S.A., but John Henry is Talcott’s native son.” So he gave in, canceled all the Pittsburgh plans that had already been planned out. Christ, this city is a fucking sewer in the summertime.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
It’ll be good for you to get out of the city. Get some good country air.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
Why does everyone keep saying that? Country air, country air, everywhere I go. Watch me get a call from some guy in Minnesota saying we got to do the same thing there for Paul Bunyan. “An office of the United States Government can’t show unfair treatment blah blah.”
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
I have some “relations” as they say, in West Virginia.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
(rubbing a cigarette burn on the bar’s surface)
They’re trying to use the John Henry thing to make the town into a tourist trap. The stamp gave them the idea apparently. All sorts of big fun.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Tractor pull. Hayride.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
They got Ben Vereen coming.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
(grinning)
Pulling out all the stops. Look at it this way—you get to hang out with the stamp collectors.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
That’s a pleasure.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
You can look forward to that.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
They always got those moist lips.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
They’re always licking their lips because they got all those stamps but they can’t lick ‘em.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
Turns my stomach.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
They always try to be your best friend.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
Like I’m going to give them free stamps.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Like we got stamps in our pockets that we’re going to give them. Maybe the Weirdo is going.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
If the Weirdo is there, fuck Runyon, I’m turning back.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Shit yeah.
(gesturing)
Can we get another round?
Everything on him is free. His black (#ulink_ad9d1b6b-49c0-59aa-99d6-e7e27d1caf1e) Calvin Klein jeans hard won two years prior at a party celebrating the famous designer’s spring line. Stacks and stacks of the jeans, up to the ceiling, but more pertinent than the company’s publicity budget was the fear they might not have brought your size, or another journalist might beat you to your size, thus the resultant frenzy described the next day in Page Six of the New York Post. His T-shirt arrived in the mail one day with an advance copy of Public Enemy’s latest release. Mickey Mouse heads festooned his socks, Goofy his boxer shorts. His shoes bounty from a Michael Jordan–Nike charity event, intended for the disadvantaged kids but everybody helped themselves so J. figured why not. They are a little tight, and pinch.
J. rummages through his canvas bag for some new clothes. They had been washed by Laundry in the hotel he’d stayed at the night before and charged to his hotel bill, which was in turn picked up by the record company that had invited him there. There is always an entity at the top who pays for things. While sifting through his bag, J. notices a log of tissue paper and opens it up. He remembers: at the end of the night he’d wrapped up a small ham sandwich from the food table to save for breakfast. One time he woke up with dozens of cocktail napkins in his pockets, all stuffed down in there. He pulled out the dingy bouquets from his trousers like a hobo magician. The sandwich still looks edible. J. picks off the dried brown edges from the ham, considers for a moment the wilted iceberg lettuce, and sticks the sandwich in his maw. He starts to feel better.
Strung out from the gin and tonic and the nap dream, which was antic and enervating and which he cannot recall, he wonders what time it is, how long he slept. The desk man at the motel gave him a press packet when he registered, checking his name off a list, but J. hasn’t bothered to look at it so he doesn’t know what time dinner is. It is still light out. Someone will come fetch him. Out of boredom he picks up the glossy folder of the press material. In a golden circle, John Henry pounds a railroad spike with a gigantic hammer. He has a big grin on his face. Behind him the other workers are bent over the track, small and human compared to the black titan in the foreground. Building the country mile by mile. This is the forging of a nation. This is some real hokey shit.
After the knock on his door, he hears Lawrence call his name. He reluctantly opens the door for the publicity man. Lawrence Flittings is tall and boyish, attired with his usual elegance in a light blue summer suit. Current New York style straight out of the lifestyle mags; a subscription card could fall from his navel at any moment. His blond hair is compact and slicked back with a particularly obedient mousse, considering the Southern humidity. He smiles at J., green eyes penetrating, and says, “I’m glad you could make it, J. Get here okay?”
Lawrence is a lieutenant at Lucien Joyce Associates, one of the most influential publicity firms in the country. Have their hands in everything from home electronics to beauty products to independent movies, an interdisciplinary and gangster army of hype. They’d publicize the debut twitch of a bean sprout, an unspectacular bud in a field of identical bean sprouts, if the money was right. Lawrence is Lucien’s new right-hand man, replacing Chester, who is now in Development at Paramount. J. still runs into Chester at various events. Chester enthuses about his new job profusely and at length. The man has yet to connive one of his projects into the multiplexes; the scripts in question endure successive drafts, gain talent, lose talent, find new talent and sigh through more drafts. Chester draws up budgets, revises, revises again to accommodate the new people who have come aboard, and then the new people lose interest and the budgets are revised again. He is highly regarded and considered successful.
J. has yet to warm up to Lawrence. He still sees him as the new guy, a judgment that flatters J. somewhere because he has been around for so long. J. tells him he arrived without incident.
“How have you been? I haven’t seen you since the Maverick Records event.”
“The usual. Working a lot.”
“I loved that piece about Whitney Houston. You’re so clever.”
“Thank you, Lawrence.”
“I’m not the only one who thinks so, J.,” Lawrence says, spinning the valve. The publicity man proceeds to name publicists and personages whose events J. has attended on his recent junketeering streak, the ones who have fed and housed J. over the last few months. J. thinks it is his way of saying, I know what you’re up to. A smug little display of Lawrence’s power, a momentary adumbration of the inner chambers. And another indicator that Lucien controls the List. As J. dangles in the door frame and listens to Lawrence’s spiel, he makes a note to share this tidbit with One Eye, should One Eye show up this weekend.
J. nods and listens to Lawrence explain about the shuttle bus that will ferry them to the dinner venue in Pipestem, a resort town a few miles south. J. admits that he hasn’t had a chance to look at the press material yet.
“Unfortunately,” Lawrence frowns, almost sincerely, “I just talked to Ben Vereen’s people and they told me he won’t be able to attend tonight’s dinner. He’s taken ill, apparently. But the town people have lined up some local talent instead, so it should be splendid. It won’t be the Puck Building, of course, but I think you and the boys will enjoy yourselves.”
“I’m sure we will. I don’t suppose Lucien is coming down here, is he?”
Lawrence smiles. “He’s flying in tomorrow morning, actually. He’s very anxious to see how this turns out. We’ve never done a whole town before. And we’ve worked with the government, but not the Post Office. We’re all very excited. I’ll tell him you asked about him.” Lawrence pretends to glance at his watch. Duty done, time for the kiss-off. “I’ll let you go, J., I’m sure you must be exhausted.”
J. closes the door and is disappointed that there are only two locks. That bit about J. being exhausted—was that another dig at his junketeering streak? Streak, jag, binge. He crawls on top of the bed, swiping the publicity folder to the floor. He can expect Dave to make a few Bobby Figgis jokes at dinner. Junketeer jokes and junketeer chuckles all around the table. Public shame to reinforce their community’s values. But behind the jokes there will be their very real discomfort with what he is doing. J. wishes he’d gotten the official lowdown from Lawrence on the exact nature of dinner.
He tries to remember why he started. He sees himself kissing Monica the Publicist at the Barbie event. They were on the second floor of FAO Schwarz in a display of radio-controlled toys. His hand moved down the back of her black publicity dress and he heard a whirring sound. The toys were active, autonomous rambunction, tanks mostly, with a few hot rods from the future thrown in the mix. The robots collided with each other and spun off. They ran into the bottom of shelves and got caught there, unable to understand why they could not progress. They let out whines of frustration. She bit into his tongue and he tasted his blood. The next evening he went to a TNT event for their latest Civil War movie, where he dined from a menu of authentic Confederate Army rations. It was kitschy. Everyone dug it and made ironic comments. The day after that he went to the Palladium to see the hot new band from England and the next thing he knew he was going for the record.
It has been six months since her (#ulink_37003f70-7d17-562d-adac-19b3e970bb0b) father passed away, and she feels she may be ready to say good-bye to him. His remains are in storage.
Her father has been dead six months, but she isn’t sure if she is able to make the final step and take care of the items in the storage facility.
Six months after his funeral, it is time to bury her father. The monthly storage fees are a bitch.
It is the first time Pamela Street has been out of the city in two years. She pulls the curtain string, looks out on the quiet grass and cement walkways in front of the Talcott Motor Lodge, looks past the blue slit of the empty swimming pool to the soup line of begging trees, and decides it is a welcome change from the air shaft that howls outside the window of her studio apartment. At this time of year the air shaft rattles with the exertions of air conditioners, reeks with the cooking exhaust of the Chinese takeout place on the first floor of the building. The smoke from below grits the yellow bricks of the air shaft black and brown, decrees the windows de facto antiwindows, portholes onto a sea of grease. She cracks the window of room 14. This is an honest to God breeze.
The funeral was the easy part. There was a mechanism of loss in place, the Yellow Pages were handy. The funeral salesmen brandished multiple-choice sheets, coffin make, viewing rooms by rank, appendixes referring affiliated firms that specialized in exotic disposal if you wanted to scatter the deceased’s ashes into the sea near Ellis Island or out an airplane window circling over Coney Island. That was the easy part, the funeral salesmen were kind and efficient shepherds. But Mr. Street inconveniently died in the last week of the month, which left Pamela only a few days to take care of his things. His landlord, a ballbusting wretch of long standing, had been firm on this point, keen as he was on chopping the newly vacant apartment into two separate units. Pamela returned to the Yellow Pages to find a storage facility for her father’s remains.
Pamela took trains and buses to the edges of New York City. There are rules about the placement of storage facilities, zoning laws. Many have enjoyed former lives as warehouses for industries that no longer exist or have relocated to more appropriate locations outside the city. The reconditioned warehouses now serve as repositories for things of no immediate purpose but infinite unquantifiable value. If you want to know what a person is about, all you have to do is look at what they put in storage. The superannuated but too expensive to throw away. Crates of illegal revolvers. Children who have moved away to start their own lives and have affixed their favors on new objects find their childhood possessions put in storage by parents who wait for their return. People move into new, smaller apartments and exile their too-much stuff into patient solitude until the day of their improved fortunes. People disappear into the world and leave clues in storage. In storage is optimism, everything temporary and defined, it promises a reversal of destiny and yet speaks in the dull syllables of finality, has the eloquence of a cemetery. Occasionally people remember an object during blank afternoons in their new kitchenettes, seek after it, realize that it is in storage and know it is gone forever. The possessions of the dead find their way into the gigantic and solemn storage facilities of New York City, interred there by family and attended by dust.
Pamela met the caretakers, fat cigar-smoking men who had no time for questions. They kept their eyes on the loading doors, greeted movers whom they had come to know during the course of their mutual interest in other people’s things, scolded do-it-yourselfers who stared dumbfounded at the freight elevator doors. No one rushed her when she said she’d have to think about it and get back to them; they understood the traffic of their enterprise and knew there were others after her, just as there were others before her. Men in brown uniforms obligingly gave her tours of the spaces, asked her if she wanted nine-by-eleven or seven-by-five and directed her down dark corridors, switching on hanging bulbs at every turn. They brushed aside the lights’ strings as if they were cobwebs. The men illuminated storage rooms that resembled the interiors of ancient ovens. Some rooms had doors that slid up and down, others had walls of metal grating that allowed her to see the other bins, the stuff of other people, bicycles of dead children, histories of upholstery, lamps from bolder decades, dartboards and family portraits. She couldn’t judge spaces. They asked her if she was storing a studio or a one-bedroom or a two-bedroom, and she told them she was storing a museum.
After visiting a dozen storage places, Pamela decided on Dalmon, which is only two blocks from her house. Only two blocks away her neighborhood changes; Tenth Avenue broods near the river, where the city has different priorities. Dalmon has reasonable rates and even offered to move the material for her, at a small cost. It is very convenient. She met the movers the following Saturday at her father’s apartment in Harlem. The movers were two young Dominican men who smiled a lot at her throughout the job, nice guys. She showed them the boxes that contained her father’s John Henry museum and they urged dollies up the brownstone steps, coaxed carts through door frames, gouged walls. Pamela left the furniture, the plates, the rest of her father’s things for the landlord to clean up, fuck him. The movers drove their van downtown and banished the boxes from her immediate responsibility.
No one wanted it. She made a few inquiries, called universities. Tuskeegee, Howard. She got lost in voice mail, mailed letters that did not receive responses.
She stalled out that spring. Pamela temped aimlessly, a migrant worker harvesting words per minute. The agency called her early in the morning if they had anything for her; otherwise she watched television in her pajamas and contemplated the bills from the storage facility, which distilled her hatred for John Henry into a convenient monthly statement.
Haunted by stuff. Hunched over ramen, in the same clothes she’d worn for days, she felt dazed. She was on the patch. She was off the patch. She was on the gum and smoking in between. She didn’t go out that much, partly because she couldn’t afford to, partly because going out did nothing for her mood. Her friends understood, her friends told her it was natural. It was part of the grieving process. Therapy diffuses: everyone knew the cant, the correct diagnosis. It was natural. It had nothing to do with her father, however, it had to do with John Henry, the original sheet music of ballads, railroad hammers, spikes and bits, playbills from the Broadway production, statues of the man and speculative paintings.
She thought about not paying the bills. When Dalmon finally unloaded the stuff (there must be auctions for such things, an entire culture based on the commerce of the dead or bankrupt, what did they do with what they bought), it would be like they were selling John Henry, not her father. This argument never got very far in her head. It was her father. She paid the bills on time and stopped eating out as much.
In May Pamela received a call from a representative of the town of Talcott, West Virginia. The months after her father’s death marked the longest stretch in her life that she had not heard the name. The woman on the phone was very kind. The town was planning a festival to celebrate their town and John Henry and wanted to know if they could buy her father’s collection of material. She hated the name Talcott and refused, even though it was the obvious solution to her dilemma. The woman, Arlene, was persistent but Pamela did not budge. It wasn’t a matter of money; they made a generous offer. She knew there were reasons, probably pertaining to the so-called grieving process, that she did not want to relinquish her burden.
In the end the matter was decided by the arrival of a handsome invitation from the Talcott Chamber of Commerce. Perhaps a few days out of the city would help her make up her mind.
J. catches up with Dave Brown in (#ulink_c45909c9-c856-5359-99d5-2aa8669473c0) the parking lot of the Talcott Motor Lodge. The night is clear and naked and swarming with so many anxious stars that it almost seems to him an invasion, a celestial troop movement auguring nothing good. In the cities it is safe because there are no stars, the light from a million apartment windows provides protection: they reduce the night into a vast purple mediocrity shielding against higher thought. J. nods at Dave, who is suited up in his bulging khaki jacket. Dave starts, “I think that in all my years of freelancing, I have never been to West Virginia. I’ve been all through Europe, South America. I saw Ali take out Frazier in the Thrilla in Manila—remind me to tell you about that sometime—I was one of the first people to interview Vaclav Havel—we talked about Lou Reed. The U.S.S.R., former U.S.S.R., Brazil, whatever. But I don’t think I’ve ever been to West Virginia.”
“Clear night,” J. says.
“Clear now,” Dave responds. “But that’s weather for you.”
“What’s up, Dave? Hey, Bobby Figgis.”
They turn to see Tiny and Frenchie, two fellow mercenaries in their covert war against the literate of America. Hail, hail. They encounter each other on the newsstands, they chafe against one another in the contributors’ notes of glossy magazines, but primarily they meet like this, on the eve of war, hungry, sniffing comps and gratis, these things like smoke from a freebie battlefield on the other side of morning. At stake: the primal American right of free speech, the freedom, without fear of censor, to beguile, confuse and otherwise distract the people into plodding obeisance of pop. Their ideals: the holy inviolability of the receipt, two dollars a word, travel expenses. The junketeers are soldiers, and they hail each other. “What’s up, Dave? Hey, Bobby Figgis.”
“I hope you don’t mind that I told Tiny about your streak,” Dave says. “I ran into him at the ice machine earlier.”
J. shrugs. He appraises his comrades. “Tiny, Frenchie. Good to see you.” The law of nicknames: contradictory or supremely apt, born of accidents and sticking for life or arbitrary and annoying. Tiny, of course, is not; he earned his nickname by not being so. At three hundred pounds, the man is hunger, gorging and grazing at the free spreads of life. If any person deserves to be on the List, it is Tiny, a creature who has evolved into the perfect mooching machine, leaving no glass undrained or napkin unstained by chicken skewer residue. He sucks up freebies in a banquet room like a baleen whale inhaling colonies of hapless plankton, swooping primeval and perfect, eyelids blinking slowly in the unlit fathoms of media. The dirigible prowls the food and travel magazine circuit; as a party trick he has been known to throw darts at a map of the world and name a princely dish native to that region, belching up its flavor on command, an archival gust from deep in his belly. Not to mention his thoroughly unwholesome fascination with curry.
Frenchie, for his part, retains an accent from his internment at a French boarding school during his adolescence. His parents were world-traveling sophisticates who unloaded their offspring with paid attendants half the year; the migrant’s ways are in his blood. Tall and slender, proud owner of a shiny black mane, this lipless wonder has cultivated a satisfied Parisian air that serves him well while playing footsie with the editors of women’s fashion magazines. For the world of international fashion is Frenchie’s specialty, he knows where to buy rice cakes and had been linked in the gossip pages to that new Italian runway model before she discovered her bisexuality. She appeared to evaporate with every step and was perceived to be the marvelous avatar of a current brand of beauty. Frenchie took his expulsion from the empyrean badly; he had ascended from reporter-of to reported-upon, his name inflated in bold type among the gossip ledgers, and now he is back in the trenches. The other junketeers saw it coming; those they write about are not their kind, and mixing with them can only lead to heartbreak.
“No sign of the van?” Frenchie asks. He looks down at his suit and, distressed, returns the tips of his shirt collar to the outside of his jacket, where they sit like the wings of a shiny red bird.
“Should be here any minute,” Dave says.
They are joined in the parking lot by a lithe young woman who is clearly not from around here; it is in her walk, a rapid skitter that places her from New York City. J. has found himself trying to slow down ever since he arrived at Yeager Airport, to get into the groove and pace of the state as a sign of openness to a different culture. The woman looks down the driveway and lights a cigarette. Waiting, like them, but no reporter. J. and his fellow junketeers are in Talcott (or just outside it, he doesn’t know) because they have committed to a lifestyle: their lifestyle pays air freight and they board planes. But why is she here? She wears faded jeans, a yellow blouse with a flower embroidered over her heart. She shifts in her boots, stamps out half a cigarette and lights another while the junketeers shoot the shit and catch up.
“It’s not here yet?” Lawrence fumes, emerging from the office with a cell phone limp in his hand, no doubt making comparisons between the publicity apparatus here and in New York and L.A. They don’t know how to do things here. “The van was supposed to be here ten minutes ago.”
“Patience, Lawrence,” Dave says.
Lawrence presses a few numbers into his phone, to beeps.
“We used to read the story of John Henry in kindergarten,” Tiny says. “The school board told the teachers they couldn’t teach Little Black Sambo anymore, so they switched over to this picture book of John Henry’s competition. Positive imagery.”
“You sound disappointed,” J. says, glancing quickly at the woman for her reaction.
“I was, a little. I don’t mean to be un-p.c.,” Tiny says. He is the kind of man who says, “I don’t mean to be un-p.c.” a lot. “But I liked Little Black Sambo. My mother used to read me Little Black Sambo when she tucked me into bed at night. It’s a cute story underneath.”
“You were undisturbed by the eyeholes cut out of the pillow you lay your little head on.”
“They were different times, J.”
“Did you hear I got a new job?”
“What?”
“It’s at the department of no one gives a shit and you’re my first client.”
“Here it comes now,” Frenchie says.
The battered blue van pulls up, New River Gorge Taxi stenciled on its side. It looks like it has been tossed by tornadoes. Workhorse of the robust fleet, J. says to himself. The driver, a ruddy-faced chap from the nabe, rolls down the window and asks, “You all going to the Millhouse Inn?” His brown, glinting hair is tucked precariously behind his tiny ears.
“All hacks in the back,” Tiny says, already steering his body into the back row. Frenchie climbs in next to him, makes a joke about there not being enough room in the seat for him. J. is pressed between Dave and the young woman. She’s coming with them. Now he isn’t the only black person. J. is grateful. If anything goes down in this cannibal region, he thinks, she will send word, and the story of J.’s martyrdom will live on in black fable.
”You’re not coming?” Dave asks Lawrence, his hand on the door.
“I have my own car,” he says.
“Big shot,” Tiny mumbles as the van starts.
The chatter of the junketeers fills the van. They talk about who showed up at the party at the Fashion Café two weeks before and not one among them can remember what movie it promoted; about the night they attended the book party for the hot new memoir, something about a rough childhood, how they swooped down on the stack of review copies and the next day all ran into each other at the Strand bookstore, laughing at the coincidence, as they sold the review copies for cash. Tiny gloats over the money he gets for selling the cookbooks that arrive every day in his mailbox: The Art of Southern Indian Cuisine, Tuscany Delight, The Master Crepe. Tiny says, you can’t eat recipes.
The woman’s arm digs into J.’s side. She smiles an apology but does not speak. Maybe he’ll talk to her at the dinner, so what brings you down here from the big city? How did I know? I could tell. J. closes his eyes to gather himself for the next few hours. Shut down for a bit before whatever god awful festivities are ahead of him. His stomach chews on itself loudly and he hopes that no one else hears it. Then he hears honking and the van lurches to the side. Peering through the windshield he sees the vehicle trying to run them off the road, the red pickup truck of his nightmares. So much depends upon a red pickup truck, filled with crackers. The pickup swerves in the lane parallel to them, dipping and zigging. The man in the passenger seat waves his pink fist out the window at them. Both drivers pounding their horns feverishly. “What the fuck is this! What the fuck is this!” Dave yells. They are being run off the road. Here it comes, J. thinks, this is how it goes down. The van capsized in a ditch. Open the door, I said open the damn door. What chew all doin’ ridin’ with nigruhs? We don’t abide no consortin’ with nigruhs in Summers County. Get out the car. Maybe one of his comrades puts up a little resistance against the taking of J. and the young lady. Then the ropes, the guns, the fire. The South will kill you.
“Slow down, slow down,” Frenchie says. “It’s all right.”
“Are you fucking crazy?” the young woman shrieks. J. thinking, now she speaks.
“No, it’s okay,” Dave reassures, pointing out the window. “It’s a friend of ours.” And indeed, J. sees, the man in the passenger seat is none other than One Eye, come in from the cold.
“You know these men?” the driver asks.
“Sure, just pull over,” Dave says. “It’ll only take a second.”
“You’re the boss,” the driver says, easing into the shoulder. The pickup pulls up in front of them and One Eye hops out, a scrambling, scarecrow figure with a short brown buzzcut. He is dressed like an idiot, with gray cloth trousers held up by red suspenders over a white striped shirt. A black eyepatch conceals his left eye.
One Eye removes his two black suitcases from the back of the pickup and offers a farewell to the man in the front seat before the red pickup takes off down the road. One Eye looks in the van and scrabbles into the passenger seat next to the driver, who shakes his head and frowns.
“What’s up, fellows?” One Eye says. “I saw Tiny’s fat fucking head in the window and knew it must be you.”
“You had your one eye peeled,” Tiny says.
“The great Cyclops,” Frenchie adds.
“My plane was late and my ride had already left,” One Eye explains. “So I hitched with Johnson there, figuring I’d catch up with you at the Millhouse.”
“You’re lucky Johnson had to run into town to buy some dry goods,” Dave chuckles. Dave Brown—what could you do with Dave Brown? It is inert, the name just lays there, as resistible as his prose. His name does not lend itself to nickname shenanigans, playful permutations.
“He was a nice guy,” One Eye says, cracking his knuckles. “More than I can say for you all. This is one sorry crew. No offense, ma’am, I’m not talking about you. Dave, of course, it wouldn’t be a junket without Dave. Being down South must bring back memories of being on tour with the Allman Brothers, huh? Yes, we all miss Duane, it was a terrible loss. Tiny, of course, thought he could wrassle up some alligator fritters. Sorry to burst your bubble, Tiny, but we’re a little north of weezie-ana. Frenchie, fuck you, I don’t know about you, but J., poor J., I had such high hopes for you.”
“He’s our inspiration,” Tiny pipes in.
“The great black hope,” Frenchie says.
“Exactly. I had such high hopes. New York, New York. Wine, women and pop songs. And I find you here.”
“He’s going for the record,” Dave offers.
“Tsk, tsk,” One Eye shaking his head. “You can’t see, but I’m making the station of the cross and praying for the soul of Bobby Figgis. Say it isn’t so, J.”
J., his name truncated to a single initial during childhood, does not need a nickname. “I’m on a jag,” he says. He is a little embarrassed about how all their bullshitting appears to the woman next to him.
“Nonstop since April,” Dave says, happy to be finally getting in his little digs before a proper audience. “Three-month bid.”
“Three months in,” One Eye says, taking stock, “Figgis was a wreck. You seem to be holding up.”
“Jag.”
“Hit an event every day,” Frenchie counters. “He’s going for the record.”
“How’s the book coming, Frenchie?” One Eye suddenly on J.’s side. If you wanted to shut Frenchie up, a quick rapier thrust to his ambition did the trick. Frenchie had spent his advance on clothes and lifestyle years before, without delivering word one of his manuscript, thus urging his comrades’ initial envy to curdle into warming superiority, and then well-timed derision. If he wanted sympathy he should have never written those Talk of the Towns for the New Yorker, a sure friendship-killer in the freelance world. Frenchie does not say anything; One Eye’s shiv dispatched him to the site of his more recent failure, to the bed he shared with his lost Italian model, her lost thighs.
One Eye had been blinded in a tragic ironic quotes accident a few years before. As he sat on a couch chatting with a publicist, a young freelancer stood above him, relating a droll tale of Manhattan mores as expressed in a new collection of short stories by that month’s photogenic young writer. The bartender yelled out last call for the open bar, and One Eye jumped up on instinct, just as the freelancer punctuated his clever description by forming air quotations with the index and forefingers of his hands. The point in question was apparently very ironic, requiring a vigorous expression of the ironic quotes. The force of the irony, coupled with One Eye’s eager and frantic upward movement, drove the freelancer’s pincer fingers deep into the junketeer’s eye socket.
J. reaches over and snaps One Eye’s suspenders. “Where did you dig this up?”
“This is my Huck Finn outfit. I’m trying to gain trust, blend in.”
“You look like an idiot.”
“I know.”
“Couldn’t miss this one, eh? Where are you coming from?”
“Florida. I was visiting my parents.”
“Okay time?”
“It’s Florida.”
“Figured you’d stop on down here for some more Southern hospitality.”
“I’m on a secret mission,” One Eye says. His good eye winks mysteriously. “A mission that could very well change the course of human events.”
“It’s hush-hush.”
“I’ll tell you about it later,” One Eye murmurs. He turns back to face the road. He isn’t kidding, J. thinks.
“I can’t wait to see Ben Vereen,” Tiny says.
“He canceled,” J. informs him.
“What, creative differences?”
“No, he’s sick,” J. says, and the van continues its approach to the Millhouse Inn.
The List possessed a will and function (#ulink_34418fdb-2a19-5f9e-b812-2717c4bffc76). It sensed a need for itself, for an assemblage of likely suspects to get the word out. A group of men and women who could be called upon in times of need, individuals of good character and savvy, individuals who understood the pitch of the times. And the pitch of the Times. The public needed to know about the things that were being created by capable interests, a hunger existed among the public for the word, all that was needed was a reliable system to get the information to them. The List recognized the faces of itself: they turned out in bad weather, tired and hungry, night after night. Sometimes the ones who came got the word out; other times they took a few hours’ reprieve from the chaos, a free meal and trinkets. The ultimate percentage was the thing that mattered, the unconquerable ratio of events covered to events not covered, that was the final concern.
The List pondered the faces of itself and reached out. The List kept abreast of the latest advances in information technology, contacting its charges by mail, later by fax, then email, whichever medium was most appropriate. The men and women on the List were astonished to find themselves contacted by email, having only just signed up for an email account a few days before and not having given their new email address to many people. They did not complain. It was convenient. If they wondered about the mechanism of the List, they kept their concern to themselves, or voiced it in low tones, during private moments. They feared expulsion. There had been a few cases of those who had abused the gift. One went mad. Another stopped filing and only showed up to eat from the banquet without giving in return. For the sin of not searching for outlets in which to deliver the word, this latter individual was deleted from the List and eventually became an editor. He looked at his colleagues from the outside, invited to only a fraction of the events he had been invited to before, and all remembered the look in his eyes.
The List was just. The List saw a discoloration on its person, watched as the discoloration described a face, and the face was added to the List. The faces the List plucked from its body were surprised. Some were new to the game, others old hands bitter for being overlooked for so long. Some appeared with much effort, others easy as pie. Some tried to figure out which event or article had been key, the one that blessed and graduated them, the one that had proved their worthiness. It was to no end. Shmoozers were passed over and the quiet diligent welcomed; the reverse was true just as often. It was inscrutable.
The List had been pushed from the earth by tectonic forces. The List possessed a specific gravity measurable by scientific instruments. The List contained weight and volume.
The List was aware of those in its charge. It knew if writers moved, switched from this newspaper to that magazine, if they died or retired, and updated itself accordingly. The men and women of the List were surprised at the promptness of the List’s readjustment, but only the first time. After that first time they were surprised at nothing. Contact names were updated with military precision. The publicity firm rolls were never obsolete. If a bouncer at a club quit, or went to jail, or moved to a different club, his replacement was noted and identified to eliminate possible embarrassment. The quirks and pet names of maître d’s at the popular restaurants were indexed. A harmony was achieved.
And the List rewarded the world. The percentage was maintained. Cover stories with witty headlines. Short and long reviews in the back of the book. Profiles of stars and magnates and web geniuses, insightful questions, silly questions, questions that begged still further questions, column inches adding up, fodder for the next iteration of the press packet. The public figure and the private citizen were rewarded. Those with dead careers walked among the living, resuscitated by a press release and attendant event at an appropriate venue. A financier who had done nothing real to speak of lately save collect interest threw a party to inform the public he was still alive. Around the Christmas shopping season a new gadget perched on a black pedestal, product of prodigious intellect, its virtues enumerated by those who had received it for free. The great ebb and flow of need, chronicled, subscribed to. A comeback. A meteoric rise. A next big thing, jostling for position in a year-end double issue. The reclusive author breaks her silence and grants interviews to justify her grandiose advance. The precocious upstart seen at the right parties. Behind the scenes at the award ceremony. The triumphant return. The inner life of. The secret world. The stories were told. There was a need. The List facilitated.
This inveigler of invites and slayer of (#ulink_fbea28c7-74f7-5526-9ac3-0ed53b359003) crudités, this drink ticket fondler and slim tipper, open bar opportunist, master of vouchers, queue-jumping wrangler of receipts, goes by the name of J. Sutter, views the facade of the Millhouse Inn through reptilian eyes.
Is he supposed to take this place seriously? The walls of the rustic hotel and restaurant are obviously some factory concoction, J. sees that from yards away, the ridges and pocks identical from stone to stone. He can’t figure out what style its designers tried to effect, colonial flourishes abut antebellum wood columns, modern double-pane windows nestle in artificially weathered frames of molting paint. Nice attempt by the toddler ivy along the walls, but hell, he discerns the wire firming it in place. But the water wheel is the biggest atrocity. The fountain jets force water over slats that do not move, the spray energetic and process of no natural movement, splashing into a cement pool lousy with plastic lily pads floating moronically, congregating near the drainage grate. Snug up against a hill, this establishment totally new, intended to service the legions of tourists who will flock here now for John Henry Days. They hope. A hipster kid with more hooks in his face than some ancient, uncatchable fish, strutting down Soho in seventies’ bell-bottoms, has more period authenticity than this place. What is he doing here? He is going for the record, his works gurgling with slow, heavy fluids.
First things first when they hit the Social Room. Objective One: find a base of operations. Most of the tables had already been colonized by the other factions, but there is Frenchie tracking ahead, wading between chairs before the rest of them have finished taking stock of the room, on point, surveying, dithering a little between two tables to the far left of the podium before dropping his bag on one and motioning the other junketeers over. He nods to himself, second-guessing his choice, but no, this is it, this table is definitely it. As J. and the rest march to join him, they progress to Objective Two, libations, scanning the joint as they advance on their seats. Two bartenders barely out of their teens work their alchemy in a corner under ferns. John Henry Days employment largesse stealing labor from the fast food outlets, J. surmises. The junketeers take their seats and dispatch Tiny and Dave for drinks. A few citizens of Talcott and Hinton hover around the bar, but there is an opening on the left flank, a chink where Tiny or Dave might weasel in and dominate.
“I don’t see a cash register,” One Eye comments, sipping water.
“Me either,” J. seconds.
These are some real white people, J. thinks, looking around. These people go into hair salons armed with pictures of stars on CBS television shows and demand. He is out of his element. He discovers the food table on the other side of the room. Looks like salad to start. His stomach grumbles again but he decides he can wait until the boys come back with the drinks. Bit of a line anyway. J. notices that the woman in the van has chosen a different table. Probably a good choice to keep her distance.
The drinks arrive, dock, find berth in waiting palms. Frenchie sniffs, asks, “This Gordon’s or what?”
Tiny shakes his head. “No, tonight they’re breaking out the good stuff. I asked the guy if he had any moonshine and he just looked at me. Was that un-p.c. of me?”
“Obviously you haven’t heard of the great Talcott Moonshine War of Thirty-three,” One Eye says over the rim of his glass. “You’re stirring up old wounds.”
J. has forgotten that afternoon’s vomit incident but then he smells the gin. Bubbles break against his nose. He figures the ham sandwich he discovered in his suitcase has settled his stomach a bit. “Cheers,” he says. Everybody’s already drinking.
One Eye nods to the right, to an efficient-looking lady with a strong stride approaching their table, clipboard against her chest like armor. The handler. Can spot a handler a mile away, just as easily as she identified them. She introduces herself as Arlene. “I hope you had an easy trip out here,” she says, smiling.
Nods all around. Tiny belches. J. thinks she is smiling at him more than the others. “I left some brochures with the press packets at the hotel,” she says. “You should see what the county has to offer. Maybe you could include a little about the New River in your articles.”
“Articles?” Tiny says under his breath.
“I saw them,” Dave says, ever the appeaser when it came to the game. “Sounds like there’s a lot of nice things in these parts.”
In these parts. One Eye and J. look at each other: Dave is shameless.
“You should check it out if you get a chance,” Arlene advises, retreating from the table. “Well, you enjoy yourselves tonight; tomorrow is a big day. I see you’ve already made yourselves at home. If you have any questions, or if you’d like to talk to the mayor or one of the event planners, feel free to grab me at any time.” She departs, but not before smiling at J. again. Why was she smiling like that. Some kind of overcompensation for slavery or what? He leaves his seat to nab some salad, passing Lawrence on the way, who raises two fingers in greeting without breaking eye contact with the fellow he is talking to. The man is a pro.
It is a cafeteria salad, a Vegas all-you-can-eat salad, but J. doesn’t mind. He has a good feeling about the main course. He swipes a brown wooden bowl and tries to ration himself, judging the length of the buffet versus the capacity of the bowl (always this necessary consideration of cubic space), he catches a glimpse of celery up ahead and makes a note to save precious room.
“Haven’t these people ever heard of arugula?” Frenchie complains when he returns, looking a bit reticently at the fixings.
“Iceberg lettuce contains many important minerals,” J. says.
The conversation in the room cuts out and at the podium Arlene asks for everyone’s attention. She introduces Mayor Cliff and relinquishes the mike to a tall man with jagged gray hair and wolverine eyebrows. The skin of his face rough and sunken, eroded. Descended from railroad people, J. decides, he has timetable worry and collision fret in his genes. None of the other junketeers pay Cliff any mind; Dave is in the middle of an elaborate joke about a one-armed hooker.
The mayor says, “I’m glad you all came out here tonight to celebrate what our two towns have achieved in the past and what we will accomplish with this weekend.” Feedback curses the air and a chubby teenager scrambles to minister to the p.a. system. When the screech ends, Cliff thanks him and continues. “We’ve all been working hard these last few weeks and months, and I know I’m not the only one who’s glad that the day is finally here. My wife is very happy, I can tell you that. Charlotte—will you stand up? See that big grin on her face? That means no more 3 A.M. phone calls from Angel about her latest flower brainstorm. No more waking up to find Martin asleep on our doorstep with a report on the latest disaster.” A good part of the room chuckles in recognition. J. sighs. “Now it’s all paid off. So drink up, get some food and enjoy yourselves—you’ve earned it!”
Cliff takes a sip of water. “Some of you may have already heard that Ben Vereen will not be joining us tonight. I talked to his manager on the phone a few hours ago and he explained that while Mr. Vereen was very excited about coming down to Talcott, he was suffering from laryngitis and couldn’t possibly perform.” J. nibbles on a carrot and shakes his head. Laryngitis—probably resting after the vigorous and well-deserved ass-kicking he delivered upon his patently insane manager. “While this is a great blow—Mr. Vereen is an amazing performer loved the world over—we’ve arranged for some homegrown talent to appear after dinner. I won’t reveal his identity right now, but I know that some of you have heard him before and know he will not disappoint.” J. decides to tune him out. He doesn’t need to listen to this homespun rubbish; he has all weekend to gather material, what little he needs. Will he have to do actual research? Who is he kidding. But he could always use a quote or two to round things out. Nine hundred to twelve hundred words—the website editor said they hadn’t determined the average attention span of a web surfer, so they might trim his article if the next round of market research dictated. Twelve hundred words—he can excrete that modest sum in two hours no sweat, but a nice quote would spice it up. There is no need to listen tonight; he has two more days to badger some unsuspecting festival-goer into a colorful quote.
Cliff departed; in his stead ambles up some guy from the Post Office. Maybe ask that sister from the van her thoughts. She has something to say, J. figures. He sees her at the next table, listening to the Post Office guy, surrounded by the natives. Just as he is. J. looks around the room and confirms that they are the only black people in the joint. Honoring a black hero and them the only folks in the room. John Henry the American. He finishes off the last of the salad and looks over to see what is going on in the food area and he sees the red light.
He sees the red light and understands.
The red light at the head of a buffet table signifies one thing and one thing only: prime rib. J. has been waiting for this confirmation all day. In the airport he had glimpsed it in a vision and now it has come to pass. He sees himself cutting into the soft red meat, slicing first through the milky rind of fat, then gaining the meat and watching the blood extrude through dead pores at the loving, sedulous pressure of his cutting. J. sees the red light of the heating lamp at the far shore of the buffet table and immediately conjures mashed potatoes softening in essence of beef, the blood tinting the fluffy potato pink and refining it even purer, softer. This vision is the sublime distillation of all the buffets he’s known, the one and true spirit summoned by caterly prayer. He waits for them to wheel out dinner, he waits to be fulfilled.
What makes him tick, this collector of (#ulink_b1b90dce-ef53-58bb-ab7c-edaeec18803a) stamps? He doesn’t know himself. Alphonse Miggs sits in the Social Room of the Millhouse Inn, he sits on his hands at a table of eight, with seven folks he doesn’t know. At the start of the evening his knuckles brushed against a lump in his jacket pocket. He withdrew a mothball and, supremely embarrassed, thrust it back where it came. He wasn’t sure if anyone noticed his mark of shame. For the rest of the night he feels cursed with invisible pockets and all at the dinner can see his shame, the great pearl of naphthalene clinging to his person, smell the fumes of social incompetence emanating from it. Scoring their nostrils. The woman next to him, are her nostrils curling as she addresses him, is she sniffing him? She is about fifty years old, with a jubilant round face and well-pruned hedge of red hair. Noticing that he does not speak, noticing that he is one of two visitors from out of town at their table and not the black one, she introduces herself as the owner of the flower shop in Hinton. Her name is Angel and she smiles at Alphonse, exposing lips swabbed by red lipstick. Her accent elasticizes her words, jaw-jutting, sweet-sounding. She gestures at the glad ring of rainbow flowers around the podium, the looping green garlands dipping along the walls, and informs him that she spent hours devising pleasant arrangements for this weekend. Is she sniffing him? He nods at the vase in the center of the table, at the halfhearted burst of drooping tulips. He says they are very elegant. She thanks him and introduces him to her husband, a skinny man with a sun-cragged face who smiles a greeting at him before turning back to his conversation with the man next to him. She is in charge of all the floral arrangements, Angel explains, from tonight’s dinner to Saturday’s afternoon steeldriving exhibition and dinner, even the grand finale on Sunday, the stamp ceremony in town. As she recounts the preparations for each event her face seems to recapitulate the satellite emotions of each endeavor, the daisy hassle of Saturday’s lunch, the gladiolus hell of the steeldriving match. It is the biggest job she has ever done, her distributor downright apoplectic at the size of her shipment, the shifting orders and delivery dates. She has never commanded so many flowers before, it is a science, she could write a book about it, she jokes, but it all turned out fine in the end as anyone could plainly see and she got the name of her flower shop in the program. Which is good publicity. And where is Mr. Miggs from?
The drive from Silver Spring had been pleasant. It didn’t matter where you lived, Alphonse believed, you go five minutes in any direction from your house and become a stranger in your own neighborhood. Windows, drapes, doorsteps, doors, each one harboring a stranger and not a neighbor, one of the great number that make up the rest of the world. All it takes is five minutes in any direction to find yourself in the nation. Drive six hours and what do you find?
In the Talcott Motor Lodge Alphonse had undressed, folding his driving clothes neatly and separately on the bedspread. Driving clothes, as if he were tooling around in a reconditioned Model T, white scarf trailing from his neck, but Alphonse Miggs has names and categories for his world, subsets and sub-subsets. The inventory eases navigation through the breakwater of his days. He then removed his black suit from the garment bag and hooked it on the bathroom door to let the steam soothe wrinkles. Stepping into the shower, he felt cleanser residue scrape his feet. He ran a fingernail along the surface of the tub, across the pattern of raised traction grooves arrayed in a flower pattern, and contemplated the white dust there. The packaged soap had no scent and did not foam. He used up the whole bar searching for lather.
He was the first to arrive. In general Alphonse prefers to be early; he sympathizes with movie mobsters who have run afoul of the organization and arrive at key meetings in public locations before the appointed time to test the vibe, but in this case he had merely misremembered the start of dinner. He was an hour early. Alphonse entered the Social Room and took a few awkward steps inside. No one paid him any mind. A blond woman steered her clipboard around the room, directing the staff by remote control, tapping her pen. Two bartenders with black bow ties arranged liquor bottles on their stand, swiveling the labels forward and crunching beer bottles into buckets of ice. Alphonse picked out a table that was neither too close to the podium nor too close to the wall. He wanted to fade, but he also wanted to see the proceedings. He sat in one chair, tried on the angle, and moved two chairs over. Baleful wail from the microphones. Everyone winced and stared at the teenager monkeying with the amp, the boy’s hands skittered over knobs to tame the shriek. Silence then for a moment and the people returned to their tasks. Occasionally Alphonse caught the eye of one of them and they looked away quickly; it wasn’t their job to figure out why he was sitting there so early. A teenage girl attacked his table, straightening the napkins and silverware, tickling the flowers into a pert attention. She skipped Alphonse’s placement. He looked up at her and strained a smile from his face. She moved on to the next table. Alphonse turned his attention to the garden outside the French doors. Everything green and lush and orderly out there, darker greens coming to the fore, shadows brooding under leaves as a nearby mountain somewhere ate the sun.
A large man with a chef’s hat rolled out serving tables through the kitchen door.
His philately newsletter announced the John Henry stamp that spring, reprinting word for word the USPS’s release. A 113 million run in panes of twenty. Used to be commemorative stamps were something special, their limited runs hypothesizing scarcity down the line, bloating value. But there were so many now, issued so frequently that their significance dwindled. Alphonse Miggs collected railroad stamps.
He watched the people arrive. The preparations trickled to last-minute adjustments, an errand of tonic water, discipline of curtains and the other guests arrived. Five men in light summer-weight suits appeared at the door and the woman with the clipboard descended on them, introducing herself and gesticulating. The men looked city. Alphonse figured they were agents from the glorious USPS. They took measure of the room, looked down at the terra-cotta tile on the floor, the light blue trim of the moldings. The woman gestured at the tables, at the bar: sit anywhere you like, help yourself to the refreshments. The postal men chose a table up front. One man took his jacket off and draped it over the seatback, but seeing that his comrades did not join him, replaced his jacket on his shoulders. They proceeded to the bar one by one for seltzer water and a slice of lemon.
Natives of Talcott in exuberant summer clothes sallied forth, exchanging greetings for the second or third time that day. Alphonse watched the clipboard woman wave hello to them. They all knew each other. Perhaps he’d spoken to this woman on the phone, Arlene. The John Henry announcement drew him in and he called for more information, although he couldn’t possibly think what more he could have needed; the press release had been quite thorough. The USPS under Runyon was very receptive to the public, maintained a line to answer questions, keep the dialogue open. The man who answered his call, after a not overlong and entirely decent wait on hold, informed him that if the gentleman was that interested in the Folk Heroes series, he might want to visit the town of Talcott, West Virginia, for their festival. He gave Alphonse a contact number and asked if he could help him with anything else. Civil servants get a bad rap, Alphonse thought. He called Arlene at the Visitors Center and she was delighted at his interest, the flowing signature scribbled on the business card enclosed with the information packet described a conscientious and caring nature. He made reservations.
Some later arrivals had no choice but to sit with the man. Guests staked claims for their parties, planting flags of purses and jackets, saving seats, savoring or ruing their place in the pecking order, made the best of things. Two couples sat down at Alphonse’s table on the other side of the globe, as far from him as the rim would allow. One of the men nodded at Alphonse, and, not waiting for a response, looked into his lap as he slowly unfolded his napkin. Alphonse wondered if the table would fill up or if he’d remain out there on the ice cap. He made minute adjustments to the placement of his knife and fork. Contemplation of tines. Another local couple sat down between him and the other people, they greeted their friends, closing up the circle except for the seat to Alphonse’s right. Alphonse sat on his hands.
An excited breeze teased the napes of all in the room: the salad table was open for business. The vanguard left their seats, heads darted toward, seats emptied in twos and threes. Alphonse hustled up to beat the queue. He garnered a fine spot in the top third and they heaved forward, reading and deciphering the feet before them. A shoulder dipped and this was taken for a sign. So tight together they must smell him. Were those beets he saw, that burgundy jelly ahead? Alphonse glimpsed a man at the podium looking over his papers. The man whispered into the microphone, hello, hello. The line bristled. They were going to miss the introduction, trapped by mixed greens on the other side of the room. The man walked away from the podium, merely testing sound, but the line hurried anyway. Iceberg lettuce, shavings of carrot, chickpeas, and a nice portion of beets.
When he returned to his table, the final empty seat had been filled by a young black woman, alone. He realized he hadn’t seen a lot of black people so far, and since the others at the table did not acknowledge her, he assumed she was a visitor like him. She looked down at his bowl and walked to the salad bar. He had dolloped too much blue cheese dressing. Black people are African Americans now. Alphonse recalled again, he pondered the fact repeatedly, that the first commemorative stamp in the world had also been a railroad stamp, issued by Peru in 1871 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the South American railroad. (It is a sign.) And now John Henry, a railroad hero up there with Casey Jones, was getting his due in a commemorative stamp. Alphonse thought about the bustle of the room and the itinerary of the next few days. What he had come there to do. The woman on his left introduced herself as the owner of a flower shop. He listens and sits on his hands.
The table behind Alphonse is rambunctious and distracting. He turns around and sees five men, obviously not from Talcott: their revels are hermetic, and have nothing to do with what is going on in the room, the occasion. They drink heavily; one of their number, a gaudily dressed man with an eyepatch, returns from the bar pinching glasses together with professional poise, bearing refills for him and his friends before they have drained the drinks already in front of them. Angel tilts her head and clucks. The black woman on his right catches Alphonse’s eyes and says they are a bunch of loud journalists from New York City. She says her name is Pamela.
Before they can speak further, the woman with the clipboard taps on the microphone for attention, her lacquered fingernails clawing at the air. Salad forks are set aside. She introduces herself as Arlene from the Visitors Center, and thanks everyone in the room for attending. Alphonse feels like an impostor, of course. He has been invited to this function, but most of the people in the room are locals, have worked directly on planning the weekend. His purpose swiftly comforts him. He is undercover. The mayor of Talcott replaces Arlene at the microphone and makes a few remarks. The other people at Alphonse’s table laugh at an inside joke, a nugget of Talcott lore. Mayor Cliff is tall and gaunt. Thick gray curly hair writhes on his head, soft against the sharp ridges of his cheekbones. Alphonse isn’t listening. Tonight is the warm-up, he thinks. Tomorrow the tourists and the rest of the town, the others beside the town luminaries getting fed in the Social Room. Tomorrow the celebration is open to the public, John Henry activities and John Henry barbecues, Sunday’s trumpets-and-drums unveiling and the official release of the panes to the public on Monday. Bigger and bigger stages for the stamp. He will take his place and respond to his cue. Alphonse’s local post office had recently outfitted the teller windows with bulletproof glass.
Alphonse sits up at the mention of the man from the Post Office, Parker Smith. He watches the man leave his comrades at the Post Office table (Alphonse’s assessment had been correct) and shake hands with the mayor. Two perfect squares of gray perch in his black hair above his ears, almost the size of stamps, which amuses Alphonse slightly. Smith smiles and the emissary from the government addresses the people. “On behalf of Marvin Runyon, Postmaster General, and all of us at the United States Postal Service,” he says, teeth twinkling, “I’d like to thank the good people of Talcott and Hinton for inviting us down for this wonderful occasion. I know you must be hungry and eager for the great food and musical entertainment the good people at the Chamber of Commerce have lined up for y’all, so I’ll be brief. Did I say y’all? I’m sorry, I meant to say you all. Must be my Southern roots acting up. Haven’t had so much Southern hospitality since I was a youngster visiting my grandparents in North Carolina.”
Like a pro he waits for the chuckles to subside. People are so vain, Alphonse thinks. He watches Smith’s face twitch into earnestness. “I was talking about this with some of my colleagues just a bit earlier—how you can’t help but get caught up in the great history of this region. Talcott was instrumental in a great moment of our nation’s growth—the forging of a national railroad, an effort unrivaled in human history. It was not without cost, as I’m sure you good people know only too well. How many of the folks who take Amtrak, or receive products shipped by CXS Transportation on the very railroad tracks just a few miles away, take the time to think about the good people of Talcott and Hinton whose grandparents and great-grandparents toiled under adverse conditions to bring this country together?” He takes faces in the crowd one by one with his eyes. “How often does one of those passengers on the train think about all the blood and sweat that made their journey possible? Part of what we at the Post Office hope to achieve by our issue of the Folk Heroes commemorative is to create awareness of the trials of men like John Henry, to invite Americans to walk in his shoes. That each time they use one of our Folk Heroes stamps, they think about the men who died to get us where we are today.”
Is this man talking about a stamp or taking the beach at Normandy? Smith rallies for his final push: “But you all here today know much more about the sacrifices of railroad workers than I do,” humble now, “it’s your history. You don’t need to hear me go on about it—your families have lived it. I just hope that this stamp, and the celebrations this weekend, can help tell the story of the sacrifices of men. John Henry was an Afro-American, born into slavery and freed by Mr. Lincoln’s famous proclamation. But more importantly, he was an American. He helped build this nation into what it is today, and his great competition with the steam drill is a testament to the strength of the human spirit. The USPS is proud to honor such an American. Thank you.”
A few minutes later, Alphonse finds himself in the food line next to Pamela. They stand next to each other and do not speak and both know a little bit of token conversation is appropriate. They are seated at the same table and the night is already half over. But perhaps he is past the minuet of social graces. Alphonse decides to play his part, however—they can sift in vain through the clues later—and asks the woman what brought her to Talcott. Her face stiffens a bit and she says that her father collected John Henry memorabilia. That’s interesting, Alphonse offers, because he is a collector as well, a collector of railroad stamps. Then her expression. He has seen the expression on her face before. It is the uncomprehending, loose shape faces adopt when he tells people he collects stamps. He informs her of the coincidence of the first commemorative being a railroad stamp, and here they are today. She looks puzzled and grabs a plate. The fumes of naphthalene swirl around him.
The old joke: what did the young lady say to her stamp-collecting suitor?
Philately will get you nowhere.
Pamela and Alphonse forage from the heated trays and do not speak again until the end of the night, after the commotion at the journalists’ table has come to an end.
Applause, hands sliding toward slanted forks, as (#ulink_30f0d5ab-c0a4-5907-b25d-a439150730b3) the Post Office man leaves the podium and Arlene announces that dinner will be ready presently. Not presently enough for J. He looks up at the thin, meek man with the polka-dot bow tie standing over their table. A press laminate hangs around his neck, abject and ridiculous. J. feels embarrassed for him; wearing a press laminate is so gauche. After waiting in vain for Frenchie to finish his story or for one of them to acknowledge his presence, the man finally clears his throat and says, “Arlene said you were some writers from New York City.”
“That’s right,” Tiny says, “We thought we’d git ourselves down yonder for this shindig.”
“My name is Broderick Honnicut,” he declares, tapping the press laminate. “I’m a staff writer for the Hinton Owl. Thought I’d come over and say hello.”
“Staff writer for the Hinton Owl,” Frenchie considers, raising his eyebrows at his colleagues. “Well, well. I think I’ve seen your byline.”
“You broke the story on the chicken rustling ring, I do believe,” Tiny says.
“Chicken rustling …?”Honnicut utters.
“The chicken-choking scandal,” Tiny corrects himself.
“Turned out the cover-up went to the highest levels of government,” Frenchie breaks in, taking the baton. “The town barber was implicated, according to a high-level source.”
“The alderman got caught with his hand in the cookie jar,” Tiny says.
No need to mess with this guy, J. thinks. He just came over to be friendly and he gets this. It is going to be a long night if the boys are this cantankerous early on. He twists in his seat to ponder the red light.
“Allegedly, Tiny,” Dave admonishes, “always remember allegedly.” He turns to Honnicut, smiling. J. knows he is about to set the guy up. “They’re just joking with you. Say, tell me: What’s the Hinton Owl’s motto?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Honnicut says, growing flustered.
“You know what I’m talking about,” Dave explains. “Every paper has a motto. The New York Times has ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print,’ every great newspaper has to have a motto. Beneath your logo, there’s a motto, right? What does it say?”
“It says,” Honnicut stumbles, “it says, ‘A Hoot and a Holler: The Hinton Owl Sees All.’”
Dave smiles. “That’s catchy.”
“‘A hoot and a snoot will keep you up all night,’” Frenchie says, and J. lights out for the food table. Because the red light is calling him. At the terminus of the buffet lies the sacred preserve of the Happy Hunting Grounds. Set above the cutting plate like a divine illumination, the red heating lamps warm the sweet meat. The red light is a beacon to the lost wayfarer, it is a tavern lamp after hours of wilderness black. J. experiences an involuntary physical response to the red light and begins to salivate. Sometimes he feels this in movie theaters, salivating at the glimpse of the red Exit sign. What a warm world it would be, he ponders, if we all slept under a red light at night.
When he returns, plate tottering, a sodden Babel of flavor, J. notes that Honnicut has departed. J. is grateful—he couldn’t take much more of that. He looks around for One Eye, but can’t see him anywhere, not even in the food line. No matter. J. has important business. The potatoes have declined his invitation, but J. still savors the pliable tang of overcooked heads of broccoli, carrots in star shapes, decobbed corn in pearly water. And the prime rib, the prime rib, aloft in its own juice, mottled with tiny globules of luscious melted fat. He showers the meat with salt, as if there could be anything greater in the universe than beef drenched heartily with salt. He possesses teeth sharpened by evolution for the gnashing of meat, a digestive system engineered for the disintegration of meat, and he means to utilize the gifts of nature to their fullest expression.
“This may be the New South, but they haven’t caught up to everything, thank God,” Tiny says. “This ain’t no vegetarian menu.”
“Amen to that,” J. says.
“Ben Vereen was coming here?” Frenchie asks, incredulous. His plate is immured by empty glasses, mutilated limes groaning at their bottoms.
“It’s a living,” J. says. He gobbles prime rib and winces with pleasure, fighting telltale paroxysm. He needs the meat to pile on the liquor.
“How are they going to pay for all this?”
“Emptying the town coffers.”
“No new basketball uniforms for the high school varsity team.”
“Not the basketball uniforms!”
“Any of you actually writing this thing up?” Tiny asks, a yellow liquid glistening in his beard. He has filled twin plates with buffet mounds of horrific symmetry.
“I’m doing it for this travel site Time Warner is putting up on the web,” J. informs him.
“Those guys are just throwing money away,” Frenchie opined. “Fine with me.”
“I got some outfit called West Virginia Life on the hook,” Dave begins, “a monthly job they put out down here. But before I placed it I had been thinking about making it a New South piece. No one thinks about West Virginia. Throw in a few lines about the national parks and the white rafting stuff they got around here. It would have been a nice change of pace to do a trend thing after all these movie things I’ve been doing.”
“Seems like a good peg,” Frenchie says. “Though if I were writing it up, I could see focusing on the industrial age–information age angle. John Henry’s man-against-machineness. That’s still current, people can empathize with his struggle and get into it and all that shit.”
“So you’re going with Bob is Hip?” Tiny demands of Dave, his voice rising.
“Why not?”
“Are you sure it’s not Bob’s Alive!?” Tiny hisses.
It is an old argument. Freddie “the Bull” McGinty, before his unfortunate heart attack, had identified three elemental varieties of puff pieces, and over time the freelancer community had accepted his Anatomy of Puff. An early junketeer, the Bull (so named for his huge and cavernous nostrils) observed the nature of the List over time and posited that while all puff is tied by a golden cord to a subject, be it animal, vegetable or mineral, the pop expression of that subject can be reduced to three discrete schools of puff. For the sake of clarity, the Bull christened the archetypal subject Bob, and named the three essential manifestations of Bob as follows: Bob’s Debut, Bob Returns, and Bob’s Comeback. Each manifestation commanded its own distinct stock phrases and hyperbolic rhetoric.
Bob’s Debut is obvious. Like lightning, Bob, the talented newcomer or long-struggling obscure artist, scorches the earth, his emergence charged by the profound electromagnetics of pre-Debut publicity and sometimes genuine merit. Such a glorious Debut deserves to be heralded in the glossy chambers of media. The out-of-nowhere record by the young lad from Leeds, the searching and surprisingly articulate second-person voice of the crab fisherman’s roman à clef, the visionary directorial outing channeling the zeitgeist—all these works can be attributed to Bob, and Bob’s Debut is a reliable story, the struggling talent is recognized, the indomitable vision championed. It makes good copy. This is the first manifestation of Bob.
Then comes Bob’s Return. His sophomore record, aimless electronic noodling in some cuts, fame has gone to his head, but still listenable; the second novel, recapitulating some of the first’s themes, somehow lacking, emboldened by success he tries to tackle too much; guaranteed by contract final-cut approval, the director esteems his instincts out of proportion, the special effects intrude and he can’t trim it down to under two and a half hours. Bob’s Return is well chronicled, he is a known quantity naturally pitched to editors, but not without hazards. He may have fallen out of favor among his initial champions and the long lead times of monthlies make cover stories a risky proposition. No editor wants to look at the cover of their magazine and see that they’ve showcased the profile of a celeb whose return had flopped miserably the week before. Editors guess, sniff the culture, and commit to Bob’s Return, fingers crossed that the opening weekend box office will not be cursed, that the goddamned critics have not panned Bob’s Return vehicle irredeemably to the mephitic baths of perdition. Weeklies and Sunday sections of major dailies have a leg up on the monthlies; if something magical happens, they can hitch a ride. This is the second manifestation of Bob.
Bob’s Comeback is miraculous. It can occur two years after the doomed or mediocre Return, or twenty years. Many things could have happened in the intervening time to make Bob’s Comeback printworthy: five crafty but overlooked novels consigned him to the twilight of midlist; three big-budget flops, two straight to video movies, one sitcom and a couple softcore thrillers fit only for the dingier cable outlets made a character actor of Bob; five very strange albums anointed Bob a critics’ darling but a radio pariah. The long unchecked skid into obscurity. But then the comeback. Something shifts in pop. It helps if they have overcome a drug problem. Test screenings positive, publishing industry buzz a-flowing, advance radio airplay of the first single augurs good things. The publicity blows fire out of the cave, scaring the townsfolk, scaly thighs scraping in preparation for a rampage through the village. All the bad things the critics said are forgotten, the industry insiders rally around Bob, the author of the where-are-they-now? article is tendered his kill fee. Bob’s Comeback makes covers. Equipped with a new look, a new agent, a new deal, Bob is back on top. Everybody loves an underdog, a redemption story. This is the third manifestation of Bob.
The Bull’s musings were well received by his freelancing brethren. It brought order to their lives. Spat upon by editors, insulted by neophyte publicity minions, the junketeers embraced the woeful clarity of the trinity. By the time J. made the List, another variety had been identified and sanctioned by the junketeers. The trend piece. The phenomenon of the trend piece was brought to the table by a British music writer named Nigel Buttons, who had journeyed into the lounges and clubs of London, cozied up to DJs and promoters of tiny establishments situated at the bottoms of stairwells accessible only by alley, the garrets of demimonde, and decided that the three traditional categories could be expanded to include a new one: Bob Is Hip. By the addition of Bob Is Hip, Bob’s other manifestations could be infused with new life by situating Bob in a scene or cultural eddy. Say Bob is a ukulele-playing gent who wears sunglasses on stage. If the evidence warrants, and even if it doesn’t, Bob the ukulele-playing sunglasses-wearing gent can be insinuated within a burgeoning scene of ukulele-playing sunglasses-wearers—they have a culture and slang, they all sleep together, the romantic entanglements internecine. It is an exotic subculture that begs further exploration. Bob, blessed by a multirecord or multibook or multipicture deal, spotted by well-paid talent scouts with special acumen, takes an early lead on his cohorts and is now the glorious exponent of an underground movement. Depending on the circumstances, his Hip Debut promises a spectacular earthshaking realignment of pop; he finds his true voice in his Hip Return; the maundering and general getting-his-shit-together years of his decline are justified by the Hipness of his Comeback. The Bob Is Hip variation met with some initial protest until its endorsers suggested that creating novel catch phrases from “the new” or “post-” or devising witty neologisms for the nascent movement could ensure one’s fame. A subculture is an amino acid soup out of which book deals crawl. More important, Bob Is Hip has broad applications. A manufacturer of blue jeans bruits its new tapered leg line. A junketeer attends and feasts at the event, but has no real peg to pitch the story. Armed with “The Neo Taper” and a broad manifesto, the blue jeans are a bona fide trend, no matter how short-lived, no matter how isolated. Presently, Bob Is Hip was a viable form of puff. Some junketeers jockeyed to grab credit for creating the quintessential Bob Is Hip piece, flailing their clippings in the air, neologisms underlined and backed up by concrete examples of their passage into conventional usage, but there were many contenders and the issue was never settled. Bob’s manifestations had become four.
Tiny started the argument in the Social Room because of a recent disturbance among the junketeers. Since the days of Gutenberg, an ambient hype wafted the world, throbbing and palpitating. From time to time, some of that material cooled, forming bodies of dense publicity. Recently this phenomenon occurred more frequently. Everyone felt this change, it was tactile and insistent. They found themselves in abstract rooms at events of no obvious purpose. Certainly there was a person/artifact/idea on display being promoted, but there was no peg, no impending release that it could be traced to. Without a peg, the subjects in question were hard to sell to the editors of newspapers and magazines. And yet the articles ran, the expenses were reimbursed, payroll cut the checks. The public liked them. Updates on well-known public entities who were doing nothing at all, a computer marvel far from implementation, musicians in coffee shops years from demos. The undiscovered hired flacks before they needed them; the established but quiescent or loafing celeb retained publicity apparatus to remind the people of their mere presence. Hence the new, hotly debated variety called Bob’s Alive! or Simply Bob. The golden cord had been severed and puff pieces roamed the newsstands, unmoored to any release date. Simply Bob. Gossip columnists had engaged in Simply Bob activities for years, some argued. A sighting at a club or restaurant, walking the shar-pei on Fifth Avenue, cruising a downtown haberdashery: these engagements were memorialized by bold type in the daily gossip columns. With junketeers munching and noshing at the tables of nonevent more frequently these days, and finding their reportage published, some sort of addition to the now-ossified varieties of Bob seemed imminent.
J. doesn’t have an opinion either way. While accustomed to thinking of four varieties of Bob, his work will not change if Bob’s Alive! is ratified and passed by the body of junketeers. He will weather the rough seas of the polemic. Puff is puff; it is puff. Observing the debate from the sidelines, he will wait for the smoke to clear, and continue to perform his function as he has for many years now. J. saws off a corner of prime rib and sticks it in his mouth. One piece left. He decides to finish off the limp broccoli and save the final bit of beef for the end.
Tiny rails against Bob’s Alive! “I was against Bob Is Hip, too,” he reminds them with a snarl. “I never thought we should have gone that way. It’s too diffuse—this is a prime example.”
“I remember your whining,” Frenchie recalls.
“And now you want to go and bring in this Bob’s Alive! thing. Is Talcott Alive?”
“I said New South,” Dave corrects. “That’s a trend piece. I can bring in improved race relations. It’s Bob’s Hip. Talcott is hip, they have a black hero. I can bring in Atlanta. I can bring in lots of stuff. Houston—Houston is hot now, it’s attracting a lot of diversity.”
“I’d go for Debut personally,” Frenchie says.
“Debut?” Dave asks. “John Henry has been around for years, this town is a physical thing that has a history. I don’t personally care to know what that history is, but it surely exists. I think trend is perfectly appropriate.”
“See what I’m talking about?” Tiny thunders, spraying droplets of a substance from his beard like a dog shaking off rain. “You could make a case for Talcott as Debut, Comeback or Return or Hip. It’s all jumbled up now. I’m accustomed to four varieties of puff and I like it like that. Four elements, four humors, four seasons, four varieties of puff. Otherwise why have categories at all? Why not make everything a category. A puff for every little thing.”
“We already have that,” One Eye interjects. “We call them magazines.” One Eye has been quiet all night, and after his comment he looks back down at his food and prods corn. J. asks him if anything is wrong.
“Just thinking is all,” One Eye says.
“Thinking about your secret mission?”
“What?”
“You said in the van. A mission that could change the course of human events.”
One Eye’s one eye narrows. He had forgotten he mentioned it. Dave, Tiny and Frenchie continue their argument. One Eye leans over to J. and whispers, “I’m taking my name off the List. Permanently.”
“You renounce Satan and all his works? How do you intend to do that?”
“I have been plotting and planning, my friend, plotting and planning.” His face illegible. “I’ve had this event circled in my filofax for some time now.”
Before he can question One Eye further, J. sees Arlene go up to the podium. The musical entertainment. The red light beckons. Deciding he better get seconds on the prime rib before they close the food down, he throws his napkin on the seat and hustles. No hick is going to gyp him of his bounty. He removes himself and scurries over to the red light. One Eye looks disappointed, but J. figures he can pick up the conversation later. Arlene describes the singing prowess of one of the sons of Talcott, a boy who will go on to great things. This time J. doesn’t take any vegetables. He asks for five proud slabs of prime rib. A young man departs one of the tables near the podium, a burly teenager with a soft balloon face. His baby fat has never gone away; it has chased the teenager’s growth inch for inch, keeping in step, swelling proportionally. At the boy’s table are an older man and woman—his mother and father, J. gathers. He hadn’t noticed them before. That makes five black folks in the room. Who says integration can’t work, he asks himself.
J. returns to the table, plate before him, the raja’s rubies on a velvet bed. Dave and the others are watching the boy get himself together at the podium. He wears a black church suit and a brazen red tie clenched by a clumsy fat knot. His eyes and mouth, tiny things, disappear into his soft face like the buttons of a plush couch. The boy looks a little nervous, but then he starts to sing, and from the depths of him rouses a gorgeous baritone—it reels from the amplifiers like a flock of dazzling birds. The boy sings the “Ballad of John Henry.” The boy sings,
John Henry was just a baby,
When he fell on his mammy’s knee;
He picked up a hammer and a little piece of steel, Said,
“This hammer will be the death of me, Lord, Lord,
This hammer will be the death of me.”
John Henry was a very small boy
Sitting on his father’s knee,
Said, “The Big Bend Tunnel on the C&O road
Is gonna be the death of me, Lord, Lord,
Is gonna be the death of me.”
John Henry went upon a mountain
And came down on the side;
The mountain was so tall, John Henry was so small,
That he laid down his hammer and he cried, “Lord, Lord,”
That he laid down his hammer and he cried.
The rude talk that pestered the earlier speakers disperses. Lord, Lord: He hacks at primal truth and splinters off words and the men and women ache. Enraptured, all of them, openmouthed in beatitude and slack in delight at the nimble phrasings of the boy. Except for J. J. attacks the prime rib. He has not had his fill. He cuts off a piece ringed by a crust of blackened fat and sticks it in his mouth. It is a big piece, a hearty plug of meat, he doesn’t know what time he’ll eat tomorrow and he needs the meat. He rends tendrils of meat with his teeth, repositions them with his tongue, rends them further. He swallows quickly, another piece already impaled on his merciless tines, and the plug catches in his throat. He can’t breathe.
The boy sings,
John Henry told his captain,
“Captain go to town
And bring me back two twenty-pound hammers,
And I’ll sure beat your steam drill down. Lord, Lord,
And I’ll sure beat your steam drill down.”
John Henry told his people,
“You know that I’m a man.
I can beat all the traps that have ever been made,
Or I’ll die with my hammer in my hand, Lord, Lord,
Or I’ll die with my hammer in my hand.”
The steam drill set on the right-hand side,
John Henry was on the left.
He said, “I will beat that steam drill down
Or hammer my fool self to death, Lord, Lord,
Or hammer my fool self to death.”
It won’t go down. He tries to swallow again but the plug will not oblige him. It is a stern and vengeful plug of meat. He tries to swallow again, panic trebling. Surely he isn’t choking. It won’t go down. He’s going to die on a junket? This is some far-out shit, this is a fucking ironic way to go. Is he using ironic incorrectly? The copy editors are going to kill him. They are really cracking down on the misuse of the word ironic, it’s like this global cabal of comma checkers and run-on sentences and fragments. Roaring in his ears. Why won’t it go down? He finds it inconceivable that no one knows what is going on with him. They are looking at the boy and listening to his words. He has a problem asking for help. He does not want to look weak. And it might not be an emergency. Surely it will pass. The meat is just fucking with him. He could jump up, slam the table, knock over their free drinks, that would get their attention. But he’s sitting there choking, quietly choking. Is this his pattern? That sounds like a diagnosis. And if he can self-diagnose, he can self-medicate. He has practice in that area. But you can’t do that when your throat is stopped. Seduced by a red illumination. Bang, whimper, what the fuck.
The boy sings,
John Henry dropped the ten-pound hammer,
And picked up the twenty-pound sledge;
Every time his hammer went down,
You could see that steel going through, Lord, Lord,
You could see that steel going through.
John Henry was just getting started,
Steam drill was half way down;
John Henry said, “You’re ahead right now,
But I’ll beat you on the last go-around, Lord, Lord,
I’ll beat you on the last go-around.”
What’s this guy singing? He’s choking on the stubborn plug of meat. John Henry, John Henry. He works on the C&O Railroad. He pushes puff, he is going for the record. His muscles must be jumping out of his skin. It won’t move, it sits like a bullet in his throat. No oxygen for me, thanks, I’ve had enough. Luke Cage the Marvel Comics superhero had bulletproof skin. At one point he had a sticker book where he kept stickers of Marvel Comics superheroes, they jumped out of the page, dynamic, Avengers Assemble and all that, muscles on full ripple, Luke Cage the jive-talking ex-con. This is what we get. Your whole life is supposed to flash before your eyes and this is what I get. Step into the light. Red light? What was up with that yellow shirt he wore anyway, some sleazy guy in a disco laying lines on the ladies, Luke Cage. He finds it incredible that in this crushing and collapsing time, he has the time to think these thoughts. But they say your life flashes before your eyes. I’m a sophisticated black man from New York City and I’m going to die down here. With cicadas, they got cicadas down here, don’t they. I want roaches, real crumb-eating fucks from out of the drain.
The boy sings,
John Henry told his shaker,
“Big boy, you better pray
For if I miss this six-foot steel,
To-morrow will be your burying day, Lord, Lord,
To-morrow will be your burying day.”
The men that made that steam drill
Thought it was mighty fine;
John Henry drove his fourteen feet,
While the steam drill only made nine, Lord, Lord,
While the steam drill only made nine.
John Henry went home to his good little woman,
Said, “Polly Ann, fix my bed,
I want to lay down and get some rest,
I’ve an awful roaring in my head, Lord, Lord,
I’ve an awful roaring in my head.”
Isn’t there something he is supposed to do? He feels like he is falling from a height. He can’t think of it. He can excrete twelve hundred words in two hours and yet he can’t think of any last words. How about an epitaph? He can’t get farther than his name and the pertinent bookend dates. He slaps the table to get their attention. Their drinks jump. He sees a restaurant sign, yellow and deep blue, on the wall of a restaurant, on the walls of infinite restaurants. Who wants to be the guy in the picture turning blue? Black folks turn blue? Look for the telltale signs. Pictographs. Certainly public service announcements, like road signs and airport signs, need a simple language. Simple message, simple expression. Is that a journalistic axiom? He can’t remember, and yet it sounds so official. Nobody notices his death. Sensation of falling. Who wants to be the blue guy in the choking picture on the wall of a cheap restaurant? Where is this place’s sign? There must be laws about the placement of the signs, eating establishments must post them in convenient places. Federal law, but then maybe they vary from state to state. States’ rights! States’ rights, these people love their states’ rights, signs on fountains, back of the bus, Rosa Parks. This place will fucking kill him. He should have known better. A black man has no business here, there’s too much rough shit, too much history gone down here. The Northern flight, right: we wanted to get the fuck out. That’s what they want, they want us dead. It’s like the song says.
The boy sings,
John Henry told his woman,
“Never wear black, wear blue.”
She said, “John, don’t never look back,
For, honey, I’ve been good to you, Lord, Lord,
For, honey, I’ve been good to you.”
John Henry was a steeldriving man,
He drove in many a crew;
He has now gone back to the head of the line
To drive the heading on through, Lord, Lord,
To drive the heading on through.
He stops falling. His body bursts and he is jerked up out of his seat. Involuntary Physical Response: the signs people keep on their lawns to repel burglars? He jumps out of his seat. My eyes must be popping out my head like some coon cartoon. His hands point to his throat. Can’t these people see what’s going on? The boy keeps singing. The pain is in his throat, around his throat and he would like them to make it stop. All these crackers looking up at me, looking up at the tree. Nobody doing nothing, just staring. They know how to watch a nigger die.
PART TWO MOTOR LODGE NOCTURNE (#ulink_8797f7bf-bb7a-53e0-b1e0-6f4b513924e6)
The first blow shattered half the bones (#ulink_8c9b5003-a387-5a11-a887-72273b80ee22) in the boy’s hand and the second shattered the other half. There was no way he could stop his hammer from coming down the second time. He was swinging his next blow before his first struck the bit. That night in the grading camp someone said that they could hear the boy’s scream all the way on top of the mountain and down in the shafts, louder than the sound of blasting. The boy’s hand was all chewed up. The doctor would have to cut it off. The shale dust settled into the blood and melted into it like too-early snow. The other driver dropped his sledge and his shaker told one of the water carriers to run for help. They had stopped singing. This was time out of the Captain’s timetable.
John Henry looked down at the boy. He had the build, but anyone could see he wasn’t a shaker. Too much of the rabbit in him. The boss had told him the boy was a shaker on the west end and had been reassigned to fill in for L’il Bob. L’il Bob had been coughing fiercely the last few days and needed a day of fresh air to clear out his chest. He kept a bucket by his cot for what he spat up. No one mentioned miner’s consumption, the black rot of the lungs caused by the foul air. Between the smoke from the lard and blackstrap candles, the rock dust and the blasting fumes it was a miracle they all weren’t sick after a year in a tunnel. There was still time. L’il Bob didn’t want to get caught coughing and lose his grip on the drill bit. It turned out the boy hadn’t been a shaker on the west end; he’d carried water, and only for a week. What you needed were steady hands and speed, but what you needed most of all was faith. The sledge came down and drove the drill bit into the rock and the shaker had to twist the bit between blows to loosen the dust in the hole and keep the bit level for the next blow. Two quick shakes and a twist made the rock dust fly out of the hole. You had to have steady hands and speed, but you had to have faith. You had to know that the driver wasn’t going to miss and smash your hands and ruin them. You had to hold it straight. John Henry and L’il Bob understood each other, which is why John Henry didn’t like breaking in a new shaker. You had to hold it straight or you’d never hold anything in that hand again. The boy did fine for half the day, but then John Henry could see him get lazy or lose attention or maybe he just realized how crazy the job was. The candlelight was dim and useless. The candles in their hats sometimes snuffed out suddenly, the Lord blew them out, and the hammer fell mightily in darkness. The shaker’s hands better be where they had to be when that happened. If the bit got dull, or the hole got too deep for a six-foot bit and they needed an eight-foot bit, the shaker had to replace it without letting the steeldriver miss a blow. The rhythm was all. L’il Bob did his work well. The boy did fine for a long time. But then he was slow, that one time, and the bit was not level. No question he would lose that hand.
He looked down at the boy. The boy sat on the ground, leaning against a powder can, looking at his hand and screaming to split his head open. The other driver, George, tended to him. He wrapped the rope around the boy’s wrist to stop the blood. John Henry looked down at them. They were blackened by dust and oily with sweat, yellow and brown in the candlelight. This was time out of Captain Johnson’s schedule. Every night Captain Johnson came with his tape to measure the day’s heading. He started at the west end of the tunnel, took a measurement, and came around the mountain to the eastern cut and took a measurement. He could have sent one of the bosses but he did it personally. Captain Johnson had a schedule of convergence, of a moment when the final blast would break the mountain in two. Each morning the bosses changed the wooden shingles on the sign outside the cut. It was how far they had come. John Henry told the boy to quiet his screaming. He was not the first he had maimed.
He looked at his hands, the big dumb mules at the end of his arms. They did what they wanted. Palms like territories. It was stupid. Time it took the runner to get outside the tunnel, the time it took for help to arrive was lost time. John Henry bent over and lifted the boy from the ground and threw him over his shoulder, made a sack of him. He walked east, faster than going west ever was. They made ten feet a day with twelve-hour shifts. It was always faster getting out of the mountain than going in. He walked on the planks. The planks heaved up dust from beneath them with each step. He kicked a blasting cap out of his way and it skittered into a pile of dull bits the runners had left to the side. The hole they drilled that day was eight feet deep; probably the next morning the blasting crew would nestle the nitroglycerine inside it and blow it open to a few feet of heading. He told the boy to be still or else he’d drop him right there and the boy whimpered and was still. He asked the boy where he was from. The boy mentioned a town in Virginia, not far from the Reynolds plantation where John Henry had been born. Then the boy started screaming and John Henry let him. They were a quarter of a mile inside the mountain and John Henry could feel the mountain heave over him, breathing. He looked up and saw the one ugly crag that always taunted him from the ceiling of the tunnel whenever he passed. He remembered the day the blasting exposed the crag of rock and John Henry saw it for the first time, sneering at him, a spiteful beak of shale laughing at their little work, laughing at him. He worked under the crag for four days and each minute it cursed him. He was glad when they finally drove the heading past it and hoped that a charge would obliterate it. But when they reentered the tunnel after the smoke slowed and all the weakened stone from the roof of the tunnel had ceased falling, the crag was still there, angry and unforgiving, and John Henry damned it each time he walked by. The crag knew him.
The mouth of the tunnel was like an eye opening as they got closer to it. He tasted the change in the air. The ground shifted under his feet and all around him. Blasting in the west end. Some small pieces of shale tumbled from the roof of the tunnel but nothing big. Not this time. John Henry felt the back of his shirt wetting with the boy’s blood. Yesterday a blast in the western cut shook out a large section of the arching in the east heading, and a stone from the cave-in crushed the skull of one of the drill runners, Paul. He’d never talked to Paul but John Henry knew he was from further south, Georgia. They buried him with the rest down the hill. No one knew if he had any family. He saw the light swimming in the gloom and as he stepped out of the tunnel he felt like Jonah stepping from Leviathan’s belly. He knew the mountain was going to get him but the Lord had decided it would not be this day.
The blacksmiths at the mouth put down the bits they were sharpening to look at John Henry and the boy. They stood with some pick-and-shovel men and skinners and they all gawked at them. He saw the water carrier who had gone to get help standing with the boss. The carrier was out of breath and pointed at them. The boss frowned and told John Henry to put the boy in one of the mule carts. John Henry laid him down in the cart next to an empty crate of nitroglycerine and saw the boy’s eyes. He had stopped screaming and yelping and he shivered all up and down his body, his eyes open to the sky. The boss said the doctor was in town and one of the men was going to have to take the boy there. John Henry walked away from the cart to a cistern. He dipped in a cup, two cups, and gulped the water down. He closed one nostril with a finger and blew forcefully, ejecting dust and snot, and repeated the process with the other nostril. The sun was almost down. He gulped at the air to take it into him.
The boss asked him what he was standing around for.
John Henry said he needed another shaker.
The boss spat into the ground and nodded. There was no shortage of niggers.
It was custom on nights like this (#ulink_ea724cac-bf49-5036-89f3-6a82f21874dd), when they were far from home, to share stories of what they had seen on their journeys. For they understood things about each other that no outsider ever could. The stories passed the time through the night and sustained them.
And so it comes to pass that when the van returns them to the hearth of the Talcott Motor Lodge, Dave Brown, Tiny and Frenchie repair to a room to drink and tell each other stories. Frenchie had swiped two bottles of tonic water while the bartenders put away the liquor, Dave Brown shares his stock of gin and Tiny grants his room for their meeting. After the drinks have been passed around and each man has slaked his thirst, Dave Brown says that what happened to J. reminds him of something he had seen years before, when he was young. His comrades lean forward to listen to his story and Dave Brown begins his tale.
“They were the greatest rock and roll band in the world—do you understand what I mean when I say that? They were a thing that could never be again. Those days are over. Today the record companies have that kind of hysteria down to a science. It’s a matter of mapping the demographics, man, but the thing about that time is, there wasn’t a demographic. We were all the same thing. Mick was singing about stuff we all did. Fucking around with girls in the backseat, cruising up and down the streets looking for something we couldn’t put our finger on but we knew it when we saw it. Satisfaction. We were all war babies. Mick and Keith knew what it was like to grow up in the fifties. It was the same over there as it was over here. They had the same parents. They were the war generation and we were the new generation.”
“Flower power.”
“You know me better than that. I’m saying it was different. It all seemed possible. That doesn’t sound like me, but that’s what it felt like and the Stones were a part of it. They made me want to write about music. Do you know what I mean? Talk to any rock writer of that time and they’ll talk about the Stones. You can argue for hours about the Apollonian and the Dionysian, but the dark wins every time so fuck the Beatles, just fuck ‘em, perspective-wise. In the long view. I’d come back from college and sit in my room with my little record player with my hand on the needle and transcribe their lyrics. I filled a whole notebook with Stones lyrics and my annotations—which blues song Keith had taken what riff from, which words Mick was cribbing from who. Before they got their own voice. And I still consider that my first book. You can go to the Museum of Television and Radio in New York and look up their early appearances and see what I’m talking about. Ready, Steady, Go in sixty-four. The girls screaming, God, you can smell their panties. This fucking whiff. Can you imagine what it must have been like for parents to watch that on television with their children and realize that their fresh-faced daughters all wanted to fuck that mangy scarecrow guy on stage? Not kiss and nuzzle, but actually fuck Mick Jagger. Hell, I wanted to fuck Mick and I’m as straight at they come. You can still feel it in those old black-and-white museum pieces. I looked them up last year when I was researching this thing for GQ. I had some time to kill so I got out the tapes of Ready, Steady, Go and T.A.M.I. And it all held up. One of the museum interns came by and I thought it was my father going to tell me to turn it down.
“So those were the good old days. By the summer of sixty-nine all those screaming girls had stopped cutting their hair and let those Annette Funicello bobs go to hell. They burned their bobby socks and tramped around in dirty feet and had run away from home to join the fabulous furry freak carnival. Most of the Stones’ TV appearances for the last few years had been on the news, not Ed Sullivan—they kept getting busted for various drug charges. Mostly a little pot, but that’s what it was like back them. Getting busted for a little grass was big news. Brian Jones was a corpse at this point. He was always the ragged prophet of the group, standing off behind Mick with that airy look in his eyes and then he finally lost it. I feel it is one of my primal personal fucking tragedies that I never met the man. They found his body in a swimming pool and that was the first bad thing, I think. That should have told everybody that the gig was up.
“By that point I had started writing and was getting published. Crawdaddy gave me some regular work in the back of the book, and I got some San Francisco scene pieces into Rolling Stone so I thought I was a big shot. They were just little scene things but I thought I had hit the big time. So when the Stones came to America for their first tour in three years, I was front and center. They’d hired Mick Taylor, that dumb shit, to take Brian’s place and got B. B. King and Ike and Tina to open up for them. I caught them in Los Angeles at the start of the tour and even got into this party for them in the Hollywood Hills. This guy I knew had the same dealer as the guy throwing it and we just walked right in.”
“Did you get to meet them?”
“Not until much later. I was a small fry, like I said. I met Mick later in New York during the Studio 54 days. But that was the older Mick. He was the elder statesman then, the settled-down and established rock star. Not Jumpin’ Jack Flash. Not like then. The first time I ever saw them live was at the Forum on the kickoff of that sixty-nine tour. In L.A., I drove down for it. They were incredible, of course. They’d been out of circulation and their flock was waiting for them. The greatest rock and roll band in the world. They came out under red lights on the stage and immediately ripped into ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash.’ Mick came out with this Uncle Sam hat and a red, white and blue cape, dancing like the devil, slapping his hands together with that dance he always does, sticking his neck out like a chicken and bumping his groin against the air like he was fucking some invisible pussy. It’s a gas gas gas. This was the Let It Bleed days, and Mick was doing his best satanic trip on the crowd and everybody loved it. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’—on one level it went against the vibe the kids had been working, but still they all bought it. It was channeling the inverse of all that, it was the anti-matter but it worked. Keith still looked halfway human back then, he had this crazy black hair on his head that looked like two crows fucking. He had those long spider arms and held the guitar as far as he could from his body when he played, like he was holding this pot of steaming tar that was too hot for him. He ripped into the songs, just looking up at Mick now and again to see which way they’d take the crowd. Bill Wyman was on the left with his long woman’s face, not doing much but doing his bit as usual and Charlie Watts just looking down at his kit, half his hawk face hidden by this sweep of brown hair, that was the look that was in, everybody had it. And Mick did his strut, hands waving the crowd up and urging them on. Sticking out those famous lips of his, he’d crack his body out like a hooker peddling blow jobs on Tenth Avenue. B. B. King and the Ikettes had stirred us all up all night and Mick took all that pent-up shit and released it. It was a wild night. I remember this guy standing next to me—he looked like a narc—and when the Stones came on he tapped me on the shoulder and passed me this skunky burnt-up joint. I was pretty high already and had seriously thought for the whole show that this guy, this schoolteacher next to me, was from the FBI. Just waiting to bust me. I was fucking obsessing on this guy all night. He didn’t say anything or move the whole show, not even when the Ikettes were shaking their tits at us. So he passes me this joint and I look in his eyes and his pupils are the size of fucking quarters. He had eaten a few tabs of what, I don’t know, that’s what it looked like, and was desperately trying to keep his shit together. Then the Stones came on finally and snapped him out of it and he was back in reality, almost anyway. Who knows what he saw up there, but it snapped him out of it.
“The tour started from there and went all across the country, selling out everywhere. They made something like a million dollars over the course of it, and that’s what got them into trouble. It was the time of free concerts and festivals and that’s what the kids wanted. They demanded it. It was their right. Of course they wanted it all for free—they were Americans. Woodstock and Hyde Park and the Isle of Wight—that’s what was going on. So the rock press got into the act. Ralph Gleason over at the Chronicle wrote a piece slamming the Stones for ripping off the kids and not giving anything back. Ralph thought they should give something back, basically accusing them of being sellouts. I always liked Ralph—he was one of the last moralists. So then Rolling Stone joined in the act and that pissed off the Stones to no end. Here was their comeback tour—they’d survived the drug busts and Brian’s death, and now they were being reviled by their fans. Or the press, rather. At every press conference, it was like, ‘so when are you going to do a free concert, when are you going to do something for the kids?’ So what I’m saying is that already the concert had a bad vibe on it. It was born more out of p.r. than love for what the kids were trying to do.”
“You’ve gone from ‘we’ to ‘the kids.’”
“Have I? It was a long time ago. Maybe I’m just in journalist mode right now. I’m trying to be objective.”
“And you sound like even more of a hippie than usual.”
“I always talk like this.”
“He’s right—he always talks like this.”
“But you went in for all that peace and love stuff, right? You always talk about it.”
“I’m just trying to get some objectivity in my account, if that’s okay with you, Tiny.”
“I saw the Rolling Stones a few years ago on one of their farewell tours. One of their many farewell tours. I have a hard time reconciling. I’m trying, but I don’t get it.”
“You had to be there, Frenchie. It was a whole period that they were a part of. That’s what I’m trying to get across.”
“Don’t get mad, I’m just saying. I’m more of a Hootie and the Blowfish man myself.”
“All right, all right. So at the end of the tour, the Stones announce that they want to do their free concert thing and they want to hold it in San Francisco. Only the city fathers want this outrageous insurance bond for Golden Gate Park, the natural place to play, so they had to find someplace else. They retain Melvin Belli, this old school gangster lawyer–type to handle the arrangements. At this point Belli is handling the Manson defense down in L.A. Nice, right? He flies up to San Francisco and does some wrangling and massaging and secures the Altamont Speedway, this old stock car racing track out in the desert about forty miles outside of San Francisco. And it’s on, December of 1969.
“We drove out there in Andy Farber’s old Mustang early in the morning. I don’t think you would’ve ever met Andy—he wrote the first really great mushroom piece—but he stopped writing in the early seventies and moved to Alabama to start a chicken farm. Andy and I were drinking this big jug of California red and smoking joints as we drove out there and it was a great morning. Sunny. We’d been up all night at the pad of this friend of his and we just kept going. And we headed out and every so often we pass a van or a car full of hippies and they honk and wave, and we wave back, it’s all good fun. There’s this great energy that we’re all just going to hang out and listen to music and smoke some grass and maybe get laid and it’s going to be a good time.”
“Were you writing about it?”
“I hadn’t intended to, but how couldn’t I after what I saw? I found out Rolling Stone was putting together a package about it and I got to work. Unfortunately, I started getting sick the day after the concert, and that turned into pneumonia because I wouldn’t stay in bed, and I couldn’t get it done, which was a bummer. But I later included it in my book Rock and Roll Memories. I gave you a copy of it, remember?”
“I’m not sure I got that far.”
“I see. Well, it’s in there. It’s the centerpiece of my chapter on the Death of the Sixties, which holds up as the final word on the subject, if you ask me. So we’re passing people on the road, and the road out there was getting packed with kids and pretty soon we realized that all the cars pulled over to the side of the road weren’t people stopping to get high—they’re parking. We thought we were getting there early, but people had been camping out all night for this thing. There was no more parking up at the site and now you had to fucking park like miles away and trek up there. So Andy nosed into this little space and we started walking. It was a caravan. Thousands of pilgrims hoofing it up there. Little gangs of kids who had driven from all over the country, carrying baskets and coolers, passing wrinkled-up joints. Walking barefoot to the mount. You’d walk up one brown hill only to see two other slopes beyond it and all of them were crawling with people. Look back and you’d see even more people, the ones who got their shit together even later than you, and they were coming up behind. People banging tambourines and goofing. It was the convocation of the freak nation. No one knew.
“And of course it was a bigger mess once we actually got to the site. It was a quarter of a million people. All you could really see was heads in the distance for miles it looked like. Of course those people couldn’t hear the amps, they just wanted to groove on the event. People sat down on the brown grass on their Indian mats and blankets, bunching up their sleeping bags as pillows. They’d dance a little hippie dance on one foot and then stop, everybody so fucked up. Girls were strutting around with their shirts off, tits flopping around with their crazy moves. Tits flopping all around—they didn’t care. Long hair flowing. This was the ground zero of the counterculture at that moment in the world. They had caravaned from New York, hey let’s go, man, and slept on the floor of vans or maybe they hitched all the way. They were yearning to be part of the free festival thing they’d heard about, this new happening. It was moving and horribly pathetic at the same time. You started to notice the bad freakouts little by little. One guy would be standing with his shirt off with his arms outstretched, staring off into the sun. And his mouth would start moving and he’d look confused and shocked, like he was realizing the worst thing in the world. Their friends would take them off to one of the Red Cross tents, which were totally overwhelmed. I later found out that Owlsey was there giving away free acid, and I don’t know if that’s what was causing it, but there was a lot of bad street acid making the rounds and that was doing serious damage. There were all these skinny malnourished dogs around, I remember that. They prowled around. The kids had found the dogs on the street and taken them in. Strays taking in strays. They couldn’t take care of themselves and they’d take a dog in. It was a stimulating atmosphere with all the stuff going on; everyone wants to play with a dog, and the dogs were able to deal with the kids but you felt they were only one day away from total wildness. They sniffed around the trash and mud like they were sniffing what was coming and already adapted to it. Ready to go wild and ugly, like nature intended for them all along. It was messy enough. And then I started to see the Angels.
“The Angels had been providing security for the Dead for the last year or so. Jerry and the boys dug hanging out with them—they were these tough customers, dose-of-reality characters who put the up-against-the-wall in up-against-the-walls, motherfuckers. When the Stones finalized the San Francisco show, Rock Skully, the Dead’s manager, set them up with the Hell’s Angels. To keep things cool. Now, I’ve never bought into the Angels’ mystique. I knew what they were before Altamont and I still know it. It was a stupid decision. The Stones bought the Oakland and San Francisco chapters of the Angels for five hundred dollars’ worth of beer—Budweiser, their choice, I’m sure. I saw the first one after we sat down. Andy and I staked out some space next to a bunch of fifteen-year-olds and Andy immediately sacked out and I was lying back and taking in the scene. We were pretty far from the stage, and you could hear Santana faintly-playing, but I was in no rush to move up closer. Then I heard that hog sound, that backfiring farting sound of their motorcycles, and looked up and saw people trying to move out of the way. I saw the Angel coming toward me, with his long dark greasy hair and dingy club leather, astride this massive chopper. The motherfucker was driving his motorcycle through the crowd, just nosing it forward and revving it every few feet to scare the kids. He had this little square of black hair under his lip that was almost, but not quite, a Hitler mustache, but he had obviously cut it that way so that Hitler was the first thing you thought when you saw it. I couldn’t see the Angel’s eyes because of his mirrored sunglasses, but I could see that we were in his way and he wasn’t making any motions to swerve away. I started trying to wake Andy, but he wasn’t having it. We’d been up all night and he was totally out. His mouth open like a dead fish. So I started slapping him, trying to get him awake, but he still wasn’t having it. I kept turning back to look at the Angel, who was still descending on us, slowly, like a shark, and then the Angel kind of did this slight nod thing and turned to the right. He smiled as he passed us and showed me his rickety brown teeth, what was left of them. From anyone else—on that day, in that scene, or anywhere else, for that matter—what he did would have been a simple kindness, but I looked into his teeth and knew he was trying to tell us that he could have run us over or not and it would have been the same thing.
“I left Andy there and started to walk around and the stories of the Angels started to trickle in. The Angels were getting violent. They attacked singly and in groups. Someone would accidentally brush against them and the Angels would whup them with a pool stick—they carried baseball bats and pool sticks that they filled with lead. These things connected with skulls. Or a kid might accidentally kick up some dust on one of their hogs and get beaten up. If an Angel started something, all of a sudden two or three other Angels would come swooping down and join in and help beat up whatever unfortunate soul had crossed their stupid white trash rules of propriety. They all had the same greasy look and feral eyes. They loved it—the dirt they wore on themselves was the natural progression from safe, middle-class hippie anarchy to total anarchy, anarchy in its natural state. When they laughed at one of the kids and picked on a flower child or couple and threw their Budweiser at the head of some kid in the middle of a freakout, they knew what they were doing. They were telling the kids that the Angels were the real deal. The kids were kids playing at something, and the Angels were that something all grown up.”
“Now you’ve gone from ‘we’ to ‘they’ to ‘the kids.’ Weren’t you the same age?”
“I was twenty-six at the time. I was a little too old to take it as seriously as, say, my younger brother did. I was just past the mark.”
“So you didn’t believe it all.”
“I did or I wanted to—it’s the same difference, isn’t it?”
“All those people have straight jobs now, right? Run the country and what not?”
“That would be true.”
“This is the elegy for the lost boomer.”
“Like I said, I left Andy to his stupor and started walking the desert. The Altamont Speedway had agreed to hold the concert because the owners were basically bankrupt. It was in the middle of nowhere, just a mess of dead grass for miles in every direction, but now it had been taken over by the freaks. The towering amp scaffolds went up sixty feet in the air and the kids climbed up on them like black bugs. I saw one person climb halfway up and then lose his grip in a druggy haze, hang there for a minute, and then he fell down in the crowd where I lost him among the heads. I’d pass these abandoned stock cars here and there, rusted through and totally crashed up. Teenagers’d set up shop, spread out their Indian blanket on the backseat and ball. Some people didn’t feel as modest and rolled around in sleeping bags, or out in the open, even. Well-heeled white chicks from Marin made the rounds asking for contributions to the Panther Defense Fund and giving speeches about the struggle. Like they were war widows. I was missing most of the action on stage, but I didn’t care. I’d get there eventually. I was pretty fucked up, so I don’t know why I’m casting so many aspersions on the kids, but I’d never seen so many people in such obvious trouble in one place before. The street acid was taking its toll. I got accosted by this head in a fringe leather jacket who peered at me through Peter Tork sunglasses. He grabbed on to me, dried grass in his hair, and kept jabbering at me until I finally had to knock him to the ground. He just looked up at me and smiled and said, ‘You got it, man, you got it.’ Everyone panting in communal, barefoot freakout. The sky had gone gray. The sun wasn’t out anymore and the air was getting chilly. The p.a. warned people about bad acid, where to take lost children, and gave directions to the Red Cross tents. I saw a young woman with blood on her tie-dyed shirt and asked her if she needed any help. She said, ‘It’s beautiful, man. I just helped deliver a baby.’ It’s beautiful. She stumbled off and I just thought, what kind of woman who’s about to give birth would come out into the desert for this? That’s beautiful? People were getting seriously hurt. In the days after the concert, people kept mentioning that four people died and four babies were born, as if that was some kind of equation that balanced all the negativity out. But it didn’t. Four babies born, two people run over by cars while they slept in sleeping bags, one guy passed out in an irrigation ditch and drowned in a puddle, and of course what happened during the Stones’ set. It doesn’t balance out.
“The Angels continued to crack heads open through each act. As the Jefferson Airplane started ‘Revolution,’ Marty Balin jumped off stage to break up a fight—the Angels had started picking on this black guy near the front of the stage and Marty jumped in to break it up. And the Angels turned their fangs on him and beat him unconscious. They beat the lead singer of the Jefferson Airplane unconscious. I was still far from the stage but I heard Paul Kantner—the guitarist—take the mike and start berating the Angels. So one of them grabbed a mike and told him to shut up. They were in control. I didn’t like Marty personally—he had snubbed me at a party a few months before and though I retaliated by saying a few unkind things in print later on, I still held a grudge—but obviously the scene was now out of control. They’d beaten up a rock star, for Christ’s sake. But the show went on. The Angels controlled the night.
“I woke up and it was dark. I had a little more stamina than Andy, but the last night’s partying had finally caught up with me and I crawled into one of the junked cars and fell asleep. I vaguely remember doing that. I woke up and had all these seat springs digging into my back. I got out of the car and asked a kid if I’d missed the Stones and he told me that’s what they were all waiting for. People had ripped down the speedway fencing to make bonfires, so that lit things up a bit, I could see people dancing naked in the orange glow. You know, burn, baby, burn. Shit. And the film crew’s lights helped. The Maysles brothers were filming the concert—Mick was jealous that the Woodstock movie was coming out in a few weeks and he wasn’t in it, so he got the Maysles to film his own free concert. People were singing Stones songs like that would summon them out of their trailer and then an Angel would glide by and drown them out with his motorcycle. But then one time the hog sound didn’t cut out. It got louder and the sea of people parted and this wedge of Angels came driving up through the people like an arrow. And between their motorcycles came the Stones, protected from the crowd by their bad-ass bodyguards. The screaming got massively loud. I got myself into the wake of the Harleys and pushed myself forward to the stage. I felt the thousands at my back, hungering behind me. As the Angels helped the Stones up onstage, I saw that it was full of people. Angels, hangers-on, anyone who could still stand and control their body was up there. It was ridiculous, man. I weaseled my way to the right, and got a pretty good view. At one point one of the cameramen zoomed in on me, but I never made it into the movie.
“The big banks of lights showered the stage with a hellish red light from above. There was barely enough room onstage for the band with all those fucking Angels, but the Stones took their places. I saw this German shepherd, one of the Angels’ dogs, hoof around the mikes, eyes as greedy and hungry as those of its masters. Behind me, the miles of people pushed forward. It was the moment they had all been waiting for. Deliverance time. It was night and the greatest rock and roll band in the world was going to take them to their reward. And then it broke—Keith started to drag his claws across the strings and Mick twirled his black and orange cape and they started into ‘Carol.’ The crowd surged forward all of a sudden—we were as close together as we could have been and they wanted more. More people wanted in. It all came down to this, I thought. A few yards away, this hepcat in a Nehru jacket—Nehru jacket, shit—tumbled into one of the Angel’s hogs because the crowd pushed him and of course first one then two Angels started beating him. I was pushed forward by the shift in the crowd so I lost sight of it—the last I saw of him was a volley of pool sticks coming down on his head like lightning. The Stones must’ve known it was too violent in the crowd to play, I know for a fact they knew what was going on, but they kept playing. Thing is, it wasn’t even that great a set. Totally uninspired. All the energy they’d had in L.A. had totally dissipated by the end of the tour. They were doing the show, they were doing what they did best, but they couldn’t hide the fact that it had been a long couple of months. Maybe they didn’t take a stronger stand against the Angels because they just wanted it to be over. They just wanted to play their final set and get the fuck out of America. They’d been bullied by what the press and what the public expected, the pop had shifted and forced them into this. Or maybe they were scared of the Angels, of what they had wrought, and if that was the case then they should never have gone into ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’ It was just stupid. Mick in his Satan mode asked the crowd to please allow him to introduce himself, lit up all red against the black desert night, and the Angels took their places. The Angels brought their wrath upon the hippies, raising their baseball bats and pool sticks upon the heads of the kids. The kids all clambered and rushed up to get up to the front of the stage, they ran up to the Gates and the Angels swung down on them. Mick tried to stop it and the Stones quit the song. Mick said, cool it, cut it out. As if he were still in control. The Angels dragged away some people and things calmed down a bit. Mick joked, “Something funny always happens when we start that song,” as if he thought that you could say the words of the spell and then act surprised when you smelled brimstone.
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Colson Whitehead
From the author of ‘The Underground Railroad’, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and Longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.‘John Henry Days’ is a novel of extraordinary scope and mythic power. It established Colson Whitehead as a pre-eminent American writer of our time.Building the railways that made America, John Henry died with a hammer in his hand moments after competing against a steam drill in a battle of endurance. The story of his death made him a legend.Over a century later, J. Sutter, a freelance journalist and accomplished expense account abuser, is sent to West Virginia to cover the launch of a new postage stamp at the first 'John Henry Days' festival.John Henry Days is a work of extraordinary scope, revealing how a nation creates its present through the stories it tells of its past.
Copyright (#ulink_eb0fe7ef-e11c-55ad-8bfc-ab7ae8472612)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain in 2001 by 4th Estate.
Copyright © Colson Whitehead 2001
Colson Whitehead asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
The author has sought to obtain any necessary permissions for quotations included in this book, but has not always been able to locate their authors. If an author of a quotation wishes to contact the author of this book, he or she should contact him through the publisher.
The following sections of the prologue are reprinted from previously published material: Sections 2, 5, 6, 9 and 11 from John Henry: Tracking Down a Negro Legend, by Guy B. Johnson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1929); Sections 3, 7, 10, 12, 13 and 14 from John Henry: A Folk-Lore Study, by Louis W. Chappell (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1968); Section 4 from “John Hardy,” by John Harrington Cox, published in the Journal of American Folk-Lore (October-December 1919).
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9781841155708
Ebook Edition © September 2015 ISBN: 9780007476541
Version: 2017-02-15
Dedication (#ulink_c76ba4ab-5eee-5b50-a6f1-9d275cde49c8)
To N. S.
Contents
Cover (#u99f5668f-a79f-5c63-bb38-b3def4899a39)
Title Page (#u0622c290-59ad-5a3c-b85e-2c5e5d262194)
Copyright (#udac94838-5f96-50a6-9a7f-91ea994550cf)
Dedication (#u2815d912-2934-51cc-965f-5e30222e42f0)
PROLOGUE
PART ONE: TERMINAL CITY
Now he blesses the certainty of airports
J. sits in the backseat of an
After the killing is over, after the
Dave Brown’s byline is a roach whose
Benny waits for gravel to become hail
No one, it seems, wants to go
Everything on him is free. His black
It has been six months since her
J. catches up with Dave Brown in
The List possessed a will and function
This inveigler of invites and slayer of
What makes him tick, this collector of
Applause, hands sliding toward slanted forks, as
PART TWO: MOTOR LODGE NOCTURNE
The first blow shattered half the bones
It was custom on nights like this
Sometimes it happens. Nothing he can put
Benny said he didn’t want to go
Bobby Figgis began his career as a
Yes, her father would have loved it
Soon it will be time for the
Junketeer lore holds that when One Eye
Alphonse Miggs lies on his bed half-naked
J. lies on his bed in room
PART THREE: ON THE EFFECTS OF COUNTRY AIR
The assistant paymaster delivered word of the
Sunglasses: where are they? Sunglasses prevent arrest
It does not take Guy Johnson long
Even when he doesn’t want to Bobby
Every day in that place reduced his
The individual who wishes to purchase a
The place mats of Herb’s Country Style
There is a peaceful listlessness in the
It’s like living in a bum’s tin
Sneaky Petes, both of them, aware of
Excerpts from Hamm’s Stamp Gossip, “The Year
Adventure as she steps on the bridge
J. and Monica the Publicist were fucking
Look, there’s Paul Robeson on Broadway, in
It’s me. Calling to see if you’re
It is odd because it is just
PART FOUR: THE STEEL-DRIVING THEORY OF LIFE
They come out of cars. Out of
Don’t find a lot of white men
How do you fit all that in
When the Sepia Ladies Club convenes in
The citizens practice their aim. Some shoot
Soon after her father died the temp
The old connections re-form, and Lucien is
At the all-night bodega of souls the
The biggest spud in Summers County is
They were all there, from the eminently
PART FIVE: ADDING VERSES
Even this late in the performance, there
The purpose of the blackout curtains utilized
“When we finally got the dishwasher, my
The day in the mountain was almost
That spring there were pipebombs and pipebombs
Every Sunday morning is a blessing from
The same night as the shooting in
She wore blue. The song said never
As he did every morning to prepare
John Henry stood in the work camp
J. Sutter stands in the parking lot
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Colson Whitehead (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ucc6548cb-b20f-59a8-b18a-e16df571730f)
About 45 years ago I was in Morgan County, Kentucky. There was a bunch of darkeys came from Miss. to assist in driving a tunnel at the head of Big Caney Creek for the O&K railroad. There is where I first heard this song, as they would sing it to keep time with their hammers.
HAVING SEEN YOUR advertisement in the Chicago Defender, I am answering your request for information, concerning the Old-Time Hero of the Big Bend Tunnel Days—or Mr. John Henry.
I have succeeded in recalling and piecing together 13 verses, dedicated to such a splendid and deserving character of by gone days. It was necessary to interview a number of Old-Timers of the Penitentiary to get some of the missing words and verify my recollections; so I only hope it will please you, and be what you wish.
In regards to the reality of John Henry, I would say he was a real live and powerful man, some 50 years ago, and actually died after beating a steam drill. His wife was a very small woman who loved John Henry with all her heart.
My Grand Father, on my mother’s side, was a steel driver, and worked on all them big jobs through out the country, in them days, when steam drills were not so popular. He was always boasting about his prowess with a hammer, claiming none could beat him but John Henry. He used to sing of John Henry, and tell of the old days when hammers and hammer men could do the work of the steam drills.
Being pretty young at the time, I can not now recall all the stories I heard, but I know John Henry, died some time in the eighties about 1881 or 1882, I’m sure which was a few years before I was born.
I am setting a price on this information; I am a prisoner here in the Ohio Penitentiary and without funds, so I will be pleased to expect what ever you care to offer.
IN 1890 PEOPLE around town here were singing the song of John Henry, a hammering man. I was working in an oyster house here in Norfolk, Va. for Fenerstein and Company, and I am 66 years old and still working for them people.
JOHN HENRY WAS a steel driver and was famous in the beginning of the building of the C&O Railroad. He was also a steel driver in the extension of the N&W Railroad. It was about 1872 that he was in this section. This was before the day of the steam drills and drill work was done by two powerful men who were special steel drillers. They struck the steel from each side and as they struck the steel they sang a song which they improvised as they worked. John Henry was the most famous steel driver ever known in southern West Virginia. He was a magnificent specimen of genus homo, was reported to be six feet two, and weighed two hundred and twenty-five or thirty pounds, was a straight as an arrow and was one of the handsomest men in the country—and, as one informant told me, was a black as a kittle in hell.
Whenever there was a spectacular performance along the line of drilling, John Henry was put on the job, and it is said he could drill more steel than any two men of his day. He was a great gambler and was notorious all through the country for his luck at gambling. To the dusky sex all through the country he was “the greatest ever,” and he was admired and beloved by all the negro women from the southern West Virginia line to the C&O. In addition to this he could drink more whiskey, sit up all night and drive steel all day to a greater extent than any man at that time. A man of kind heart, very strong, pleasant address, yet a gambler, a roué, a drunkard and a fierce fighter.
MY NAME IS Harvey Hicks and I live in Evington, Virginia. I am writing in reference to your ad in the Chicago Defender. John Henry was a white man they say. He was a prisoner when he was driving steel in the Big Ben tunnel at the time, and he said he could beat the steam drill down. They told him if he did they would set him free. It is said he beat the steam drill about two minutes and a half and fell dead. He drove with a hammer in each hand, nine pound sledge.
MY UNCLE GUS (the man who raised my father) worked on the Cursey Mountain Tunnel and knew the man. He said he was Jamaican, yellow-complected, tall, and weighed about 200 pounds.
I AM A steam shovel operator or “runner” and have heard steel drivers sing “John Henry” all my life and there are probably lots of verses I never heard as it used to be that every new steel driving “nigger” had a new verse to “John Henry.”
I never personally knew John Henry, but I have talked to many old-timers who did. He actually worked on the Chesapeake & Ohio Ry. for Langhorn & Langhorn and was able to drive 9 feet of steel faster than the steam drill could in Big Bend Tunnel. Then later he was hanged in Welch, Va., for murdering a man. After sifting out the “chaff” I think I can assure you above is correct.
I have heard three versions of the song, mostly in the same section of the country, that is West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina, seldom elsewhere except by men from one of the above states. I have worked all over the South, South West, and I have heard the John Henry song almost ever since I could remember, and it is the song I ever first remember of.
I THINK THIS John Henry stuff is just a tale someone started. My father worked for the Burleigh Drill Company and told me for a fact that no steam drill was ever used in the Big Bend Tunnel. He was a salesman for Burleigh.
JOHN HENRY WAS a native of Holly Springs, Mississippi, and was shipped to the Curzee mountain tunnel, Alabama, to work on the AGS Railway in 1880. I have been told that he did indeed beat the steam drill, but did not die that day. He was killed some time later during a cave-in.
HAVING BEEN BORN and raised in the state of Tennessee and, therefore, in sufficiently close contact with the negro element there, it happens I have heard these songs practically all my life, until I left that section of the country six years ago.
I have been informed that John Henry was a true character all right, a nigger whose vocation was driving steel during the construction of a tunnel on one of the Southern railways.
THE BALLAD, BY special right, belongs to the railroad builders. John Henry was a railroad builder. It belongs to the pick-and-shovel men—to the skinners—to the steel drivers—to the men of the construction camps. It is sung by Negro laborers everywhere, and none can sing it as they sing it, because none honor and revere the memory of John Henry as much as do they. I have been a “Rambler” all my life—ever since I ran away from the “white folks” when twelve years old—and have worked with my people in railroad grading camps from the Great Lakes to Florida and from the Atlantic to the Missouri River, and wherever I have worked, I have always found someone who could and would sing of John Henry.
JOHN HENRY THE steel driving champion was a native of Alabama and from near Bessemer or Blackton. The steel driver was between the ages of 45 and 50 and weighed about 155 pounds. He was not a real black man, but more of a chocolate color. He was straight and well muscled.
THE LAST TIME I saw John Henry, who was called Big John Henry, was when a blast fell on him and another Negro. They were covered with blankets and carried out of the tunnel. I don’t think John Henry was killed in the accident because I didn’t hear of him being buried, and the bosses were always careful in looking after the injured and dead. I don’t know a thing about John Henry driving steel in a contest with a steam drill, and I don’t think I ever saw one at the tunnel. Hand drills were used in the tunnel. They were using an engine at shaft number one to raise the bucket up when we moved to the tunnel, but they didn’t have any steam engine or steam drill in the tunnel.
I’VE HEARD THE song in a thousand different places, nigger extra gangs, hoboes of all kinds, coal miners and furnace men, river and wharf rats, beach combers and sailors, harvest hands and timber men. Some of them drunk and some of them sober. It is scattered over all the states and some places on the outside. I have heard any number of verses cribbed bodily from some other song or improvised to suit the occasion.
The opinion among hoboes, section men and others who sing the song is that John Henry was a Negro, “a coal black man” a partly forgotten verse says, “a big fellow,” an old hobo once said. He claimed to have known him but he was drunk on Dago Red, so I’m discounting everything he said. I have met very few who claimed to have known him. The negroes of forty years ago regarded him as a hero of their race.
PART ONE TERMINAL CITY (#ucc6548cb-b20f-59a8-b18a-e16df571730f)
Now he blesses the certainty of airports (#ucc6548cb-b20f-59a8-b18a-e16df571730f). His blessings, when he has occasion to perform them, are swift and minimal, thoroughly secular, consisting of a slight nod to no one present, a chin dip that no witness will mark. He nods to luck mostly, to express gratitude for whatever sliver of good fortune drops before his shoes. The day’s first blessing is occasioned by a solemn white rind, a little feather, that J. Sutter notices a few yards away on the carpet and immediately recognizes, without a shade of doubt, to be a receipt.
He looks left and he looks right. He waits for one of those dull marchers to open a fanny pack, turn rigid in horror, and retrace steps to rescue the lost receipt as the wheels of their plastic luggage carve evanescent grooves in the purple carpet behind them. It could belong to any one of these folks. The anxious dislocation of travel causes them to compulsively pat pockets for wallets and passports, to stroke telltale ridges in canvas bags that most definitely must be the ticket and boarding pass, but not so definitely that the ridge must not be checked again, the bag unzipped and inspected for the hundredth time that day. In this queasy awareness of their trifling, they might notice the disappearance of a receipt more readily and start searching for it. He factors this consideration into his calculation of how long it will take him to salvage the receipt from its immediate peril in the walkway.
It taunts him, vibrates flirtatiously. What does it record? There are all sorts of things you can buy at an airport, they are becoming more and more like cities every day, one lumbering transcontinental metropolis. Double-A batteries, a teddy bear, a toothbrush to replace the one forgotten back home on the sink. A nourishing lunch—he hopes for lunch because he is hungry and the next best thing to an actual sandwich right now is the paper trail of a sandwich. Something nonspecific, even better, just a fat total at the bottom, he can tell them it records anything he wants it to. Within the elastic confines of reimbursable expenses, of course.
The receipt flutters and taunts. He is at Gate 22, at the mouth of Terminal B, and any one of the laden and harried pilgrims might be searching for the receipt at this very moment and contest his ownership should he in fact make his move. Witnesses at the counter. J. dislikes scenes. As if airport security would take his word over some middle-aged mom from Paramus. Pharmacy bin sunglasses hooked askew into the neck of her striped outlet T-shirt, her faded Cancun souvenir baseball cap, those taxpayer details, he’d have no chance.
This little boy in bright green robot gear, merchandise from whatever kids’ show is big now, contemplates the stray receipt just as intently as J. from across the walkway in the opposing camp of Gate 21, Flight 702 to Houston. He reckons the boy is waiting for one of the travelers to step on it, to relish that dinosaur foot carnage, and when this image occurs to J.—the receipt mangled by designer sneaker tread or so smudged that it would be useless to him—he immediately evacuates the plastic bucket seat, strides confidently out into the walkway with nary a guilty twitch, and after one quick glance back to make sure that no one is stealing his stuff, he bends down and grips the lonesome shaving between his thumb and index finger as gingerly as an entomologist stooping for a rare moth. No one raises a ruckus. The little boy sneers at him and performs a baroque martial arts move.
J.’s neck eases, his chin dips and he makes his blessing as he sits back down. For this is pure luck, a pristine receipt newly plucked from the great oak of consumption, and deserves a blessing. Airports bloom receipts as certainly as standing water bubbles up mosquitoes. He chides himself for waiting so long to pick it up. Why would anyone want it besides him? It is litter. Early afternoon in terminal city: most of these people are civilians, off visiting relatives or wherever normal people go, Disneyland. Not executives who will log every transaction on their corporate expense forms, and definitely not junketeers like him. No one was going to fight him over a receipt lost on the floor, tumbleweeding from gate to gate as footfall gusts urged it to some far corner. He feels foolish, but glad nonetheless that he still has his instincts. There is sure to be some hectic receipt wrangling over the next few days.
J. inspects his bounty. He brushes purple carpet fiber and a curlicue hair from the paper, runs his finger over the serration at its head. He makes a wish and scrutinizes. The printer of register #03 at Hiram’s News could use some new toner; only twenty minutes old and the receipt is already affecting a world-weary languor. Not a great haul, it won’t rank up there with the great found-receipt frauds he’s perpetrated over the years, certainly not another Planet Hollywood Paris or Prague ‘92, but still useful: one magazine and one item of candy, both identified only by strings of scanner numbers. J. makes the candy for chewing gum, puts the purchaser as a smoker in for a gnashing ride wherever he is going, but the magazine. Looking at three bucks and ninety-five cents, he puts his money on a perfume-packed lifestyle glossy: I’ll take something in a Condé Nast, please. DeAngelo Brothers Distribution has most of the Northeastern airports locked up and an agreement stipulates that Nast gets strong point-of-purchase display. He figures that on the expense form he’ll write down the magazine as research and slip the gum in as food. J. tucks the receipt in with the rest of the morning’s take, the cab and hotel receipts, and resumes listening to the airport announcements. He feels serene. He is a citizen of terminal city and he keeps every receipt in a chosen nook of his wallet and wayward receipts catch his eye from time to time.
It is safe in here. He watches his fellow shufflers queue before the gate attendants, who carve up the airplane cabin into certified tracts. This seems to him an orderly system, one of many in this concrete aviary. The giant brackets lulling the prefab sections of the terminal into peaceful aggregation, the charged and soothing simulated air, automatic flush urinals. He likes the new sound of cash registers, no more chimes: Instead this novel theater of validating purchases, the electronic scrying of purple ink across paper, that tiny pulse that reaches out to the network testing the credibility of credit cards. True, each foray through the metal detector still feels like a prison break and there is no stopping the animal jostling when boarding is announced or when the plane sidles up to the destination gate and all those grubby moist-toileted damp hands grope for the overhead compartment latches, but these are expressions of human weakness, no fault of the design of airports. J. locks his carry-on bag (he is allowed only one on this flight) between his heels. Even the cramped chaos of embarkation and debarkation can be overcome with the right attitude. People movers and white courtesy phones. Food in convenient trays. What the meals lack in taste, they compensate for in thoughtful packaging. He’s never found a human hair in airplane food. What else are plastic shells for. Iceberg lettuce contains important minerals. New advances in legroom, he’s noticed this in the last few months he has been a resident here. J. is confident that they (an air carrier coalition, squabbles checked at the door, this agenda before them) are dedicated to attacking certain essential problems and have platoons of ergonomists sequestered on a suburban campus working on the problem of legroom, circulation, the facts of biology versus the exigencies of cabin space, and that is why, even though the fruit of this work is difficult for the eye to discern, he has fewer leg cramps these days.
A gate attendant announces boarding and he waits for them to call his row. A gate attendant rips a large section from his boarding pass and he slips the remainder into his pocket as he walks down the chilly declivity to the loading door.
He forces his bag into the trim space beneath the seat in front of him as instructed. He is an aisle man, has been for years. Middle seat is a ham sandwich, and there is nothing to see out the reinforced windows, just the undigested blur of the nation. J. feels he works more efficiently if he does not think of his audience, where they live. He likes to keep his obligations to meeting the word count, a number readily verified by a feature on a pulldown menu of his word processing program.
People carefully push items into the overhead compartment only to have their thoughtful arrangements undone and encroached upon by other passengers. The flight attendants check the overhead compartments and latch them.
A plump white woman in a slim turquoise pantsuit informs him that she has been assigned the window seat. As he allows her room to pass, he composes in his mind an ad for her perfume that describes a versatile essence appropriate for both the office and evenings out. Then he places the scented ad on a page toward the front of the book, between the contributors’ notes and letters to the editor. She slides her leather briefcase beneath the seat in front of her and pulls down the shade. Her feathered red hair is as leveled as an ancient pagoda. In unison they fasten their seat belts.
It is a time of checking and rechecking of clasps and buckles and latches throughout the body of the plane, an assembly of minutiae that might make a liftoff.
He is always up in the air.
The woman in the window seat wins the first round by lifting the armrest that divides her seat and the middle seat into discreet pens. She folds her jacket in half and pats it down in the empty seat. Beats him to it. J. tells himself to wake up. He is going to need all of his skills this weekend; this woman is a civilian, a minnow compared to all those other pilot fish he’ll be competing with over the next few days.
J. watches the flight attendant nudge the metal cart up the aisle in the dot dot dash of cabin food dispensation. A snack flight, just a little jump south and east. He unlatches the food tray and slides his palms across its unblemished factory surface. The flight attendant smiles at this and deposits a square foil packet of snacks and a nonalcoholic beverage. He turns the package so that it is parallel to the edges of the tray and contemplates his lunch. Pretzel logs dusted with orange cheese flavor. The hotel this morning gave away doughnuts and coffee on a table near the registration desk, so that was one free meal he could easily categorize—even by the standards of normal people—as breakfast, and this is the second free meal of the day because another party had purchased his ticket, and then tonight there is some kind of opening-night banquet, free meal numero tres. He’ll count this package of pretzels as lunch and gorge himself on the buffet, it is sure to be a buffet, it always is, J. figures he can hold out that long. He can always hold out for a free meal. J. sucks the cheese dust and salt from the pretzels, dissolving these substances by rubbing them against the roof of his mouth before biting down into the pretzel proper. He sees the benevolent and nurturing crimson light of the heat lamp over prime rib, the cheerful blue fire of the sterno cans beneath the metal trays containing local produce. He wipes the orange residue into the cushion of his seat, which doubles as a flotation device if certain situations arise.
The woman in the window unlatches the tray of the middle seat, where she places her empty snack package and plastic glass. Round two, J. observes, flexing her might. Sending the gunboats to Cuba. She refastens her tray and after slow survey of her domain resigns herself to the unalloyed distraction of the airplane periodical.
The magazine contains, scattered among global itineraries and capsule descriptions of inflight movies, informative articles of sundry nature. A few years back J. landed a piece in there, an endorsement of new Zairian hotels; President Mobutu had been trying to rustle up some tourist traffic for that oft-overlooked country. J. observed no rivers of blood while there. It was a junketeer’s ball. Every slob on the List roused themselves for that one. Their credentials were never verified. Hepatitis a regular topic of conversation. Only J. was naive enough to actually write an article about the trip. He was green then, nervous about repercussions, clinging valiantly to an abstraction of journalistic ethics. The government flew in crates of liquor from Europe. He got two dollars a word and bought some new pants.
J. looks over the woman’s shoulder and notices Tiny’s byline on an article about the French Quarter of New Orleans. Fourth or fifth time the fucker has sold that story. At least—there are too many outlets these days for him to keep track of his own stories, let alone his comrades’. You have to admire Tiny’s nerve. A junketeer among junketeers. J. wonders if he bothered to change the lede this time. The woman notices J.’s attentions, scowls, and gestures toward him as if to remind J. that every seatback is stocked with the latest volume of the airline journal. His stomach gurgles in hunger.
After a time the flight attendant moseys up the aisle bearing a white plastic bag with a red drawstring slotted into its lip. Same kind he has at home, a convenient model that flatters his farsightedness whenever he purchases a box. J. deposits his trash and the trash from the middle tray into the bag. He returns his tray to the upright position. He almost shuts the middle tray too but then realizes that he may have trespassed by disposing of her trash. She had extended her zone to cover the empty seat fair and square. At least his armrests are uncontested. Just to make sure he grips them tightly. When the plane comes to rest at the gate, the woman grabs her briefcase and coat and shuffles toward him. His only revenge for her excellent gamesmanship during the flight is to sit still and patient as she fidgets beside him, her hand rapping her thigh and eyes prying open the overhead from afar. She is not going to move through him. J. stands when he is good and ready, when it is their row’s turn out of the bottleneck. I take it where I can get it, he says to himself.
Forget the South. The South will kill you. He possesses the standard amount of black Yankee scorn for the South, a studied disdain that attempts to make a callus of history. It manifests itself in various guises: sophisticated contempt, a healthy stock of white trash jokes, things of that nature, an instinctual stiffening to the words County Sheriff. One look at the cannibals massing at the arrival gate and his revulsion rubs its paws together and hisses. The faces are different: He always feels this fact keenly when he touches down in a place he has never been before. But on this occasion his dread expresses itself so forcefully that he has half a mind to scurry back up the ramp for the protection of his aisle seat. He has arrived at a different America he does not live in. The undiagnosed press toward the gate waiting for kin. Placed hip-to-hip, the rivulets and shadings of their acid-washed jeans describe a relief map of blighted confederacy. Powerline kids suck fingers. Between the hems of oversized shorts and lips of polyknit athletic socks sally bright red lobster flesh and craggy knees, dumb and unashamed things, sea-bottom tubers uncataloged by any known system of biological taxonomy. (None of this is true, of course, but perception is all; to and from each his own dark continent.) One man had fashioned his beard into a slim rattail, they all draw from the same tainted well, it is simply disturbing.
An image of the impending buffet shimmers in the air before him and his seizure subsides. He’s been to Atlanta a few times, but Atlanta is a chocolate city and he was never permitted to stray from the record companies’ publicity circuits. Covered Mardi Gras for the travel section of a daily in Des Moines, but felt protected in the prevailing madness of celebration, which creates pockets of safety and violence in equal measure. Stopovers in Texas but damned if he left the borders of terminal city. It is not difficult to indulge his preferences; media events tend to emerge near media centers and that means the coasts. He’s been very conscientious about staying away from the forge of his race’s history. And now here he is in Charleston, West Virginia, at the behest of the United States Postal Service and a smudge town called Talcott to cover the unveiling of a postage stamp, inertial, grubbing, hoarding receipts, because he is on a three-month junket jag he is too unwilling or too scared to break. He thinks, these people are liable to eat me.
J. searches for his name in crayon on a slab of cardboard but cannot find his driver at the gate or at baggage claim. Nice summer day: the man is probably down at the fishing hole. Or rocking in a frayed hammock. He decides to wait outside.
Hubbub of vehicles at the curb. He doesn’t have much choice other than to wait. He has no idea where he is going. Yeager Airport, named after Brigadier General Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager, or so he reads on a well-polished bronze plaque. Chuck Yeager is a native son. No wonder he took flight. J. waits for his driver to pull up in a red pickup with a bunch of chickens in the back spitting feathers.
In the passenger loading and unloading zone the carbon monoxide, so terrible after the careful atmosphere of the terminal, hangs low around his heels, heavier than air. A gang of dirty clouds loiters over there. J. says, “What a dump,” and for the second time that day he blesses the certainty of airports because he can always turn around and go someplace else.
United States Postal Service — Postal News For Immediate Release
June 6, 1996
American Folk Hero Comes to Life in Stamp Series
WASHINGTON—One of America’s best-loved folk heroes will come to life this summer when the town of Talcott, West Virginia, holds the first annual “John Henry Days” festival, which will coincide with release of the U.S. Postal Service’s Folk Heroes stamp series. Since the 1870s, John Henry has been extolled as a strongman born with a hammer in his hands and the ability to drive steel for ten continuous hours. It is said that while working for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad on the Big Bend Tunnel just outside Talcott, John Henry challenged a steam drill to a race and swung his hammers so hard that he beat the machine. Railroad workers who arduously labored during the building of the nation’s rail system literally sang the praises of this hero.
The town of Talcott is pleased to honor one of its famous residents. On the weekend of July 12, 1996, the town will host the inaugural “John Henry Days” festival, a three-day celebration of railroad history and local culture. Representatives of the United States Postal Service will be on hand for the official unveiling of the Folk Heroes stamp series, and many surprise guests and activities have been scheduled. “Folk heroes like John Henry represent the best of American values,” said Postmaster General Marvin Runyon. “The U.S. Postal Service is proud to continue their tales through our commemorative stamp series.”
Joining John Henry on the Folk Heroes series are Paul Bunyan, Mighty Casey and Pecos Bill. Paul Bunyan, according to lore, was a giant lumberjack who journeyed the country with Babe, the Blue Ox, clearing trees. Bunyan was a hero to legions of lumberjacks, who spun yarns about Bunyan clearing acres of outsized trees and employing legions of loggers from across the continent. Generations of children have heard the classic “Casey at the Bat,” which first appeared in the San Francisco Examiner in 1888. Written by Ernest Lawrence Thayer and popularized by William DeWolf Hopper, that ballad relates the story of an arrogant young baseball player who strikes out at bat, causing his team to lose an important game. Since his original tale appeared in Century Magazine in 1923, Pecos Bill and his mastery of the American frontier have been a part of our national lore. Legend contends that this folk hero was raised by a coyote and was rugged enough to ride a mountain lion and commandeer a rattlesnake as a lasso.
The stamps were designed by artist Dave La Fleur of Derby, Kansas, and will be available nationwide beginning July 15. “The folk heroes are illustrated exactly as in at least one written version of their tales,” said stamp artist La Fleur. “Each hero’s most memorable moment is depicted: Casey just before he swings his bat, John Henry wielding his hammer, Paul Bunyan his ax, and Pecos Bill his rattlesnake.”
The Postal Service will issue 113 million Folk Heroes series stamps in panes of twenty stamps. Each pane will sell for $6.40.
A special reception for members of the media will be held on Friday, July 12, at the historic Millhouse Inn. Accommodations will be arranged. If you plan to attend this event, please contact Arlene at the Summers County Visitors Center.
J. sits in the backseat of an (#ulink_c76ba4ab-5eee-5b50-a6f1-9d275cde49c8) American car of recent vintage. Jesus Christ hangs from the rearview mirror and shakes at every turn as if trying to wiggle His crucifix from the ground. Arnie apologizes again for being late to pick up J. at the airport.
J. says no problem. He looks out the back window and returns to his activity of the past ten minutes, a cool contemplation of the eighteen-wheeler chasing their rear bumper. A plastic sheet detailing the Confederate flag dominates the truck’s front grille. He can’t see the driver but he waves hello to the black window and turns. Around him the outlands of the city of Charleston, clumps of industrial parks and jumbo shopping centers and entire new species of parking lot, recede into the countryside. There is the problem of horizontal space. In the distance J. sees mountains, insurgent green lids peering over the rim of the world, whenever the smaller peaks the road cleaves through allow him to see that far. Did the settlers ever think they’d get past these slopes, J. asks himself. Cross an ocean, they make it this far into the land and worry that the whole place is like this: a concatenation of cliffs and banks, as if some hobgoblin roosting on the other side of the hills had shoved up the earth. Like a giant kicking a bunch of green carpet. Hearty folk, the mountain people.
“Do you mind if I take the back roads?” Arnie asks. He gestures at the lane ahead, the congealing traffic. “They close it up to one lane a couple of miles ahead. For construction. It might take the same time, but it won’t take longer.”
“You know the way,” J. answers. With a little luck, the monster vehicle behind them won’t follow. J. puts Arnie in his forties, paying alimony and owning his cab after years of scrimping, part of the far-flung fleet of New River Gorge Taxi. Fleet, as in two or three rheumy vehicles. Arnie’s straw hair thins and golden stubble sprouts from his chin. Eats what he catches. The interior of the car smells, not unpleasantly, of the better class of urinal cake.
“So,” Arnie clears his throat, “what are you, with the Post Office?”
“I’m a journalist.”
“Writing an article about the festival?”
“That’s right.”
Arnie asks him if he writes for newspapers and magazines and J. says yeah, even though this particular piece is for a new travel website. J. doesn’t feel like explaining the web; this guy probably thinks a laptop is some new kind of banjo. Lucien set it up. J. hasn’t worked for the web before but knew it was only a matter of time: new media is welfare for the middle class. A year ago the web didn’t exist, and now J. has several hitherto unemployable acquaintances who were now picking up steady paychecks because of it. Fewer people are home in the afternoon eager to discuss what transpires on talk shows and cartoons and this means people are working. It was only a matter of time before those errant corporate dollars blew his way. He attracts that kind of weather.
J. checks the receipt nook in his wallet again, just to make sure. He makes a concerted effort to enjoy the scenery. It is hard: all trees look alike to him. The route slips between the places the government blasted through, the hills, and the scarred rock faces stare at each other from the sides of the road, grim, still grudgeful after all these years at their sunderance. Water trickles down the rock from unknown springs, high up springs, who knows what, this is nature, down the slopes, across the roots of intrepid trees, and wets the rock faces like perspiration on the brow of a boxer. The driver is taking J. deep in. Off the interstate. He is being taken in. Lucien set the gig up when J. called and expressed his serious doubts as to whether he could place a story about a fucking stamp. It was mostly a philosophical problem; they don’t have to write about all the various events they attend, just enough to keep from looking like complete hacks. No one wants the game to be exposed, not the junketeers and not the p.r. folks who set the itineraries. Most of the time it is enough to pull out a notebook and scribble for appearance’s sake, in between passes at the hors d’oeuvres table. After a couple of years, J. has learned to only write up the events where the number of expenses and the dollar-per-word bounty make coasting prohibitive. There are never any repercussions. Publicists continue to greet him warmly and hand out press material that remains unopened, he carries away promotional items by the bushel, he eats and drinks his fill. He remains on the List.
But this stamp problem. This stamp gig was so unusual, J. put it to Lucien as a kind of challenge: who in the world would possibly care about this event? What magazine employed copy editors who could bear to touch a comma of such a piece, what newspaper had a readership that consisted entirely of drooling and defenseless shut-ins? They’d been in rough straits before, Lucien and his journalist allies, but always came through in the end if they had to, placed the piece about Ronald McDonald’s rap record (open-faced filet mignon burgers and chocolate margarita shakes at the press party), found the sympathetic editor who had column space for the plastic surgeon who specialized in Hollywood kindergartens (everyone who attended the press conference got a free estimate and a computer-generated hypothetical face to take home with them). But a postage stamp? It seemed ridiculous even by their degraded standards. In West Virginia yet. J. just wanted to know if the world had progressed to a point where such a thing was possible. He just wanted to know.
Lucien was calm and patient. He gave a little speech. He told J. to stick around his hotel room for a few minutes. A few minutes later the features editor of Time Warner’s travel website rang and said he was thinking of running a piece on the Talcott celebration and would J. be interested. Like that.
Now the road dives between peaks, past towns persistent beyond the defeat of founding father ambition. The speckling of quiet houses and rusted trucks draws itself from the muck and develops a culture and evolves into strip malls, bright knots of gas stations and fast food outlets, before collapsing again into a barbarism of shacks and rusted trucks. The strip malls are reaching for perfection. Each time they enter into the outlands of a new strip mall, J. wonders if this time the franchisees and maverick entrepreneurs will get it right, if this time the ratios are correct and density, placement, brand will configure a new and final product. One beautiful single product with acreage and registers, with multiple fire exits and convenient business hours. But each creation is botched and maladjusted, it will not play with the other kids or has a morbid disposition, and subsides, inevitably, into the silence of black country road. And soon the strip malls disappear altogether and J. will see a sign for a town, and one or two lone houses jammed into hillside accelerate into a cluster of abodes and then thin out again. Presently he’ll see the sign for the next town, all without ever passing what passes for a town in his definition. Not even a store beyond a gas station. He is confused.
Arnie says, “Nice and peaceful. Sure beats the city, huh?” Having assumed correctly that J. is not a son of the South.
“It certainly is green,” J. says.
“First time in West Virginia?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re going to like it,” Arnie assures. “‘The most northern of the southern, the most southern of the northern, the most western of the eastern, and the most eastern of the western.’ That’s what they say, and I can vouch for it. We’ve got everything here. Skiing in Beckley a good part of the year. If you get a chance over the weekend, you should check out the river. They have all sorts of white water rafting trips you can take.”
“I’m not much of a water person,” J. says. Which puts an end to the bumpkin patter for a while.
Content everlasting. The man at the website, sounded like a young guy, said they were looking for content. The website is set to launch in a few weeks. Eventually they want it to have a global aspect, but for the start they are focusing on gathering a lot of regional content. That way they pull in local advertisers, he explained. J. could hear computer keys tapping through the receiver. Time Warner is putting a lot of money into the launch, the man informed him. They want to make a big splash. He invited J. to the launch party, if J. was going to be in town. J. knew he was already invited; Time Warner is a mainstay of the List. All J. can think is content. It sounds so honest. Not stories, not articles, but content. Like it is a mineral. It is so honest of them.
Arnie and J. have been on small roads for over half an hour now, dancing along curved blacktop, past slide areas and deer crossings. The driver makes another attempt at conversation: “When I heard your name, I thought, Sutter, huh? Sounds like a Southern name.”
“Maybe my ancestors were owned down here at some point.”
“Maybe …?”Arnie meets J.’s eyes in the rearview mirror and chuckles. “That’s funny. You’re funny.” He starts to hum.
The light gives after a series of turns as the trees huddle together and snatch at the afternoon. There are no other cars on the road. Each time they clear one forbidding encroachment of hills, more livid peaks keep the car closed in. Arnie hums and taps his fingers on the steering wheel. This burp of paranoia: what if Caleb here is driving him up into the mountains, down to the creek, out to the lonesome spot where his family performs rituals. Boil him up in a pot, ritual sacrifice helps the crops grow. J. peers over the front seat waiting for the tree line to break. Taking the back roads indeed. After a few days the FBI will verify that he was on the flight to Yeager Airport, the woman in the window seat provides unenthusiastic affirmation, but after that no trail. Arnie’s cousin the local constable. Maybe not even after a few days. No one knows where he is any more than he does. His editor will just think he flaked out on the assignment. Notorious tendency of freelancers to disappear near a deadline. Boil him up in a pot while they watch wrestling on TV. He figures even the most remote shack has a TV these days. The cable carrier in this region serves a special clientele, entire public access shows devoted to dark meat recipes.
As a joke, J. almost says, “So what do you do around here for fun?” but thinks better of it. I’m a real city boy, J. thinks, I’m a real jaded fuck. Eventually they clear the woods, passing first an unattended stand of native arts and crafts that seems not to have been open for some time, then a gas station and garage with a rogues gallery of cars and pickups in its lot. Arnie says they are getting close.
Content is king, they say. Rape and pillage time for the junketeer willing to put in the time to make the contacts. A whole new scale.
“This is Hinton,” Arnie says. They had rounded a turn and now came across the biggest settlement in some time. Hinton is dropped down in the middle of a valley, a marble cupped by monstrous green hands. The car is separated from the town by the murky gray river that carved the valley; J. sees the low bridge that would have taken them into Hinton if they had turned left. A flat section of the town groups along the opposite bank, he spies a shopping center and above it the buildings inch up the mountain wall, thinning, a scattering of two- and three-story buildings that are probably the original town: old and distinguished structures. Arnie doesn’t turn left. Arnie takes him right, away and parallel from the town, down the road that creeps along the river. A strip of small establishments perch on this side of the bank, a souvenir taxidermy shop, the Coast to Coast motel. Herb’s Country Style promises chicken fried steak. Between the stores, J. can make out the other half of Hinton across the river, lurking among trees like a fugitive.
Arnie has stopped humming. “I usually only work Mondays and Tuesdays,” he says, “but the festival is paying us almost double what we usually get. You staying at the Motor Lodge?”
“I’m not sure. If that’s what they told you.”
“Well, they said the Motor Lodge, so that’s where I’m going to take you. If it turns out that’s not where you’re supposed to be, I’ll wait around and take you to wherever you’re supposed to be. How’s that sound? We can go to Saskatchewan, I don’t care.” Arnie is flexible, apparently. “I heard Ben Vereen was coming. Is that true?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I love Ben Vereen,” Arnie says. “This is shaping up to be some big party. Saying after a few years it could be bigger than the Nicholas County Spud and Splinter Festival. Good for the whole area.” Up ahead J. sees the river jump out of a gigantic dam in exuberant streams, like hair through a comb, but they veer away from it; Arnie turns left across a black bridge that takes them over the rolling water. “Talcott’s about ten miles on,” Arnie continues. “That’s where John Henry’s from. But we’re not going that far. Talcott’s pretty small, so I guess that’s why most of the stuff this weekend is being organized in Hinton. They’re like sisters.”
Past the bridge the road is unpopulated again. The road follows another branch of the river and J. looks down into tenebrous water. Trees march down right into the current and J. pictures a whole forest under the dark water, what existed before the dam raised the river. Maybe even a whole town sleeping under there. He wonders if the newspaper of the drowned town needs freelancers.
Arnie turns at a tall clapboard sign announcing the Talcott Motor Lodge. The sign has been recently repainted. He pulls up to the front door of the main building, a squat red structure with a tin roof. A statue of a railroad engineer tips its hat to all who pass.
“Here we are,” Arnie says.
J. asks for a receipt.
After the killing is over, after the (#ulink_ea88d333-d2f6-552c-9d6c-e4d7076a1421) gunman has slid to the ground, after the gun smoke has dissipated into the invisible, the witnesses rouse themselves into this world again, find themselves waking in warm huddles reinforcing each other’s humanity; they blink at their surroundings to squeeze violence from their eyes. Some gather their wits more quickly and run for help. A few possess a small measure of medical expertise and tend to the dying and shout reassuring words that are as much for the wounded as for themselves. There is a magnetism of families and friends, they are drawn together and inspect each other’s bodies for damage. The witnesses thank God. The witnesses share what they have seen and fit their perspectives into one narrative through a system of sobbing barter. In these first few minutes a thousand different stories collide; this making of truth is violence too, out of which facts are formed.
Facts are Joan Acorn’s trade this summer. She has recovered her purse and notepad but cannot find her pen. It is suddenly the most important thing in her life that she recover her pen. It’s a Bic. She thinks she must have sent it flying when she heard the first shot and dropped to the prone position described by the personal security consultant her sorority retained to teach them about self-defense. Keep low, he said, and recited statistics about driveby shootings in the ghetto. As she looked up at him from the couch in the living room of her sorority house, Joan imagined him as the kind of man who instructed the ROTC guys in military lore. He was really butch. Joan found him sexy. He knew how to tell people things so they remained in their consciousness. The consultant enjoyed a vogue on her campus, he was a prophet of anticrime come to deliver them from the rape scare. When she heard the first shot Joan dropped between the folding chairs and sent her pen flying.
She sees her pen a few yards away, next to someone’s lost sandal. A new wave of screaming starts; a new realization of what has happened thrashes around in traumatized skulls. Joan struggles to do what any journalist would do in this situation. The final event of John Henry Days was her first assignment, it turned out differently than expected, and she remembers instructions from last semester’s Intro Journalism class. She crammed late-night in her pajamas with a friend, deciphering her lecture notes for the final and dropping microwave popcorn. Joan is single-minded. She navigates through the overturned chairs. Everything is so bright. People congregate in groups and pat each other’s bodies. They dangle and sag. She makes her way to the sidewalk. Cars are hum still in the street, their doors open and mysterious and full of tales. It reminds her of a nuclear war movie.
She approaches an older couple dressed in identical green and red jogging suits. She identifies herself as a writer for the Charleston Daily Mail and asks them what they have seen. The witnesses point up to the bandstand. The witnesses point to the groups ministering to the dying. She canvasses the witnesses and tries to get the story. When Joan gets to the telephone outside the barbershop she tries to remember her parents’ calling card number and has a little bit of difficulty.
Joan gets through to the editorial desk and informs a man about the killing spree. She sees a tan police car enter the square. Her use of the words killing spree is questioned by the man working the Sunday slot, who asks her to identify herself and slow down. Joan is the intern for the Life section of the Charleston Daily Mail. She had been very excited early in the spring that she might get the chance to write about fashion, a desire she expressed to her parents during their Sunday evening phone call. Her father got on the phone to her uncle. Her uncle, a successful lawyer who had many influential friends, got on the horn to the sales director of the Charleston Daily Mail, who made calls of his own. Then disaster struck. Around April Joan discovered that her three best friends were going to travel in Europe for the summer. Joan fumed; she wished they had told her earlier, they were supposed to be best friends. But she had already given her word committing to the internship and her parents told her that to back out would make her look irresponsible. In addition, they had paid for her trip to Europe the summer before and did not want to spoil her. A compromise in the form of a new car to facilitate her commute between home and office restored the family to its customary state of goodwill.
Joan tries to slow down on the phone. The slot man tells her to just slow down and tell him what happened exactly. For a second, the men standing over the journalist part and she can see his bloody chest and slack mouth. The sales director of the Charleston Daily Mail took her out to lunch the first day of her internship and described the history and traditions of the paper, pantomiming certain key moments with his hairy fingers. Joan’s duties include opening mail, calling for art, and taking messages. There are occasional perks. One time the film editor said, anyone want a pass to a movie, and Joan took her best friend from childhood. In the movie they sat next to a beautiful news anchorman who had been on television for years and years. She made the best of things. Joan told her friends from high school, amid the silences that made apparent the divergent tacking of their lives, that she was going to write for the Daily Mail, but in fact she had little success convincing her boss of her specialness. The editor of the Life section does not seem fashionable or hip. He had been trapped by benefits and union security some years before. He is grizzled and has seen interns come and go, but Joan is an expert nagger. She is pert and brunette. In an impulse of inspired cruelty, he assigned her to write two hundred words on the stamp ceremony, to teach her about the dues all journalists must pay, no matter who their friends are. Joan was delighted and rose early Sunday morning and drove the fifty miles from Charleston to Talcott in her new car, which was equipped with a CD player.
The Sunday slot man reiterates his instructions to Joan. Just tell him slowly what happened. She perceives a stiffening in the postures of the men tending to one of the wounded and takes this as an indication of his worsening condition. She begins to cry. She cannot get the words to the slot man. She thinks, where, what, who, these are the essential questions a journalist must ask herself. And then Joan feels a warmth in her chest and she says in someone else’s voice, “Talcott, West Virginia—A postal worker opened fire Sunday afternoon on a crowd of people gathered for the unveiling of a new postage stamp; critically wounding three people before being shot and killed.”
Dave Brown’s byline is a roach whose (#ulink_1b63e6e9-34e7-5e8f-970d-f98b655d9a2d) gradual infestation of the world’s print media can only be sketchily documented. First sightings of the scourge can be traced to the late 1960s; numerous samples of the creature’s spoor have been collected from the concert reviews section of Crawdaddy. The counterculture, it is hypothesized, proved an abundant food source for the emergent insect, which seemed to thrive on the scraps of the new pop culture, insinuating itself behind the baseboards of Rolling Stone and beneath the refrigerators of alternative weeklies. The organism traveled to new publishing empires by stowing away in the cargo holds of spectacle, a survival instinct that served it well in the following decade when a threefold increase in the number of print venues provided ample nesting opportunities. This moist, expanding media proved an exceptionally favorable environment for the byline and its appearances grew at an exponential rate. It has been observed crawling above a prison interview with Sirhan Sirhan in Playboy and lazily breeding in the New York Times during the heyday of singer-songwriters. Stubborn and tenacious, the byline was able to sustain itself through climatic changes in editorial style, its reproductive cycle seemingly unaffected by the insufferable aridity of the Reagan years. Today, no newsstand remains uninfested by Dave Brown’s byline and its readily identifiable, unadorned, service-oriented prose.
On the afternoon of July 12, 1996, Dave Brown sits in the parking lot of the Talcott Motor Lodge in a beach chair, legs ajar, sunning his face with the optimistic silver of a tanning shield. He wears faded army cutoffs and bright red designer sneakers. His gray, untied shoelaces look as if they have been chewed. Dave nods at J. and gestures toward his thermos. “You want a drink?”
“What is it?”
“Gin and tonic.”
J. shakes his head and drops his bags. He looks down at his key and searches for his room number on the rows of the motel behind him. The green motel building lounges low and fat; its two floors are stacked atop each other like two worms engaged in sexual congress. J. feels a few beads of sweat pop out from his underarms. “How long have you been here?” he asks, eyes tracing green ridges.
“I got in about an hour ago,” Dave says, his head still tilted up to the sun. “Only flight I could get. I think we’re the first ones here.”
J. looks back at the hotel rooms. He asks Dave if he knows which of their fellow mercenaries will be attending the weekend’s events.
“Beats me,” Dave replies. “It’s kind of a bum gig, and those are the ones where you never know who’s going to show up. Frenchie I know, because I saw him at the Esquire thing last week and he said he was coming. Probably Tiny because he likes Southern food.” He takes off his sunglasses and shakes his head. “I’m just here because I figured I’d kill some time before I head to L.A. for the TV press tour. Charleston seemed like a nice way station in between there and New York. Get some country air and that shit. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
J. shifts on his feet. His stomach complains again. “What’s the buzz on the buffet?”
“I haven’t heard anything yet. Local culture, hard to say. But then you gotta factor in the U.S. Post Office and you never know with government food. Sure you don’t want a drink?”
“What time is it?”
“It’s about four-thirty.”
J. walks to the dry swimming pool, which looks like something he left soaking in his sink, a dirty pot caked with burnt leaves and grit. No lifeguard on duty. He drags over a beach chair, scraping flint, while Dave tips the thermos into a styrofoam cup and drops in some motel ice. J. takes a long sip and the buzzing in his head argues once more for his hunger. Dave Brown makes formidable gin and tonics. They sit and gossip for a few minutes about who they’ve seen at the last few events, discuss how the List always gets weird in the summer, thin and gawky, as the entertainment combine gears up for the fall. Everyone is in the Hamptons. L.A. keeps plugging along of course, in fact the last time J. saw Dave was at a summer blockbuster dog-and-pony show just before Memorial Day. Guns and car crashes keep everyone fed. The studio marketing people watched happily as hors d’oeuvre toothpicks were licked clean and abandoned on linen tablecloths. Travel pieces for fall publication sent the junketeers scrambling for malaria pills and sunblock. But then there are weird events like this one, odd meteors. J. feels a pain in his arm and slaps a mosquito into a bloody skid. Out in the country. This is a real die-hard gig if Dave, Tiny, and Frenchie are showing up. Which, J. observes, makes him a die-hard junketeer. Dave slathers some suntan lotion into his chest hair. Dave, the oldest one of them all, probably the first name on the List. No one knows for sure who conceived of the List, one or two prime suspects remain unconfirmed, but at a certain point the List required an inspiration, some muse of mooching, and no doubt it had to be Dave. The mastermind of the List sees Dave at a Battle of the Network Stars gala in the late seventies and is granted a vision. Dave with his oversized head screwed into a gnome’s body, in his trademark president-for-life khaki jacket, with bulging pockets overflowing but never touched in public. He has pockets for his pockets. Survival gear: a compass with the open bar at due north, waterproof pens, jungle rot remedies and prescription-strength antacid. The mastermind of the List sees Dave, notes the inclination of the free drink in his hand and the next day his secretary is fathoms deep in his rolodex and recovering the names.
Dave digs into the motel ice bucket and freshens his drink. “So, J.,” he begins, “word is you’re going for the record.” Mixing the ice cubes with his finger.
“Nah, I’m just on a jag.”
“Really? How long have you been on this so-called jag, J.? Been pretty active.”
“It’s been about three months. Mid-April. I started with the Barbie thing.” Mattel introduced its latest Barbie at an all-night party in FAO Schwarz. The new Barbie came with a Range Rover and vaginal cleft; J. and Monica the Publicist groped each other while miniature robot tanks circled their feet.
“I was there,” Dave says, nodding. “A very elegant sushi spread.”
“That’s the one. Since then.”
“Not bad. Nonstop? Moving around or just sticking around New York?” The implication being that it is fairly easy for one of their number to hit a press conference every day, score a doughnut or two, and split. If J.’s streak consists primarily of easy scores, his feat is unspectacular and quite possibly indicative of poor breeding.
“I’ve been pretty mobile,” J. says. “I was in L.A. for two weeks for the blockbuster tour, but that’s the most I was in one place and I’ve hit an event every day. I’m on a jag.”
“Two weeks is a jag, three months is a binge.” He winks, a sprightly flutter he had toiled on for days one dead summer in 1979. “Sure you’re not going for the record?” he asks again. “Because if you’ve been junketeering that long nonstop, you’ve got a good start on the record.”
“I don’t want to be another Bobby Figgis,” J. says. He is pretty dizzy from the gin and tonic; formerly a vile slick in his stomach, the drink has organized itself into an octopus-like creature that tugs and twists his insides.
“Nobody wants to be another Bobby Figgis. Just putting it out there. Let me tell you a story,” Dave says. J. offers no resistance. “One time I was at this book party for Norman Mailer. I don’t know which one, one of those goddamn things of his. I think I was going to review it for Rolling Stone. Or maybe I was just there, I can’t remember—I reviewed one of his books for Rolling Stone, anyway. Or was it People? It’s getting late and they’ve stopped bringing out the food so I’m stocking up on vittles. It was a nice spread. I had to reach over Capote, who was flailing his little rat paws in my way trying to block me. Are you with me?”
“You’re in an hors d’oeuvre war with a drunken dwarf.” It is a common enough occurrence in their line of business.
“We were two drunken dwarves trying to get in our God-given fill,” Dave continues. “Bianca Jagger flirted with me. Coke was dirt cheap that year so you couldn’t even get into the bathroom, even if you had to take a piss. You would have been home in your Star Wars pajamas. So George Plimpton comes up to me and says, ‘Do you like Peking roast duck?’ ‘Do you like the Peking roast duck?’ I look up at him. He’s talking to me in that New England accent of his, like he was chipped off fucking Plymouth Rock. He says, ‘Do you like the Peking roast duck?’ and he goes off on this detailed story about the history of the dish and the special ovens they use and how in China they used to keep the royal ducks in this nice open area and feed them the best rice and grain. It gives the ducks a special flavor. It’s like they’re spicing them up before they’re even dead. Only they—the ducks that is—think they’re the king of the hill. The landed gentry of, what is it, the mallard family, the royalty who get the best food and have the best duck lifestyle. They sneer at the peasant ducks outside the gate. Plimpton’s all spitting on me and grabbing for the duck on the table while he’s telling me this story. But what they don’t know, he says, he’s stabbing a cracker in my eye, is that they’re no better than the other ducks. They’re all going to get eaten. It’s just that some ducks get the better rice.”
“That’s a great story.”
“Isn’t it? Then he runs off to some other fab person in the room. And you know what the funny thing was? I’d never met him before. He called me by my name but he’d never met me before. It’s a fucking mystery to this day. It’s a fucking mystery.”
“This is a parable of some sort.”
“It’s a tale told throughout the ages. You want a refill?”
J. excuses himself. He grabs his bags and discovers room 27 halfway down the second floor of the motel. He hears a car door slam. Another arrival. Sarcophagal air escapes from the room when he opens the door; he will swear to that. The room is a maroon slab. First thing, J. checks out the TV and finds it receives the standard array of channels. He smells wet cement. He sits down on the bedspread, a ribbed crimson sheath that looks like it has been used to drag for bait. Across the room, a faded print describes a railroad man squatting on the roof of a caboose, angry canyon walls receding behind him, his hand waving his cap in the air above his snarl of joy. Jesus Christ. J.’s stomach surges and he runs to the bathroom and vomits.
Benny waits for gravel to become hail (#ulink_7fd6cd42-fdef-5b7e-9cf1-dcc320dbbfb7). The sound means a guest needs a room. The highway coughs up people. It is a great and unknowable sea. Benny keeps them warm, if the heaters are working.
He walked the property that morning to make sure everything was ready. Josie was still asleep. His wife had earned an extra hour or two after all the work they’d done on the place the last few weeks. Benny ran his hands along the gutters and grabbed leaves, half-born insects. The ladder creaked beneath him and reminded him of his weight, or rather the increase in his weight. When Benny got nervous the food stuck to him. He didn’t eat more, but the food stuck more. This nervousness then tipped into worry, because he didn’t like to buy new clothes, and this in turn dispatched him to the public library, where he checked out books on the human metabolism. As he returned to the office, he stopped to obliterate with his shoe an anthill that had burst from the dirt, messy and teeming, overnight.
In room 14, Pamela Street thinks about her father.
Benny sits in the leather chair behind the registration desk. Out of habit he reaches over to the little stand but it is not there. He moved the TV into the back office, away from the front, because he wanted to make a good impression on his guests. He has nothing—not the afternoon movie, no soap—to occupy him now except his waiting. Benny feels something in his thinning hair and withdraws a twig that has snared a few precious strands. Removing them from the twig, he squints at the pearl knobs of the follicles. Three more down.
Benny and Josie had spent the better part of a month getting their humble inn up to muster. They repainted the rooms and defrosted the workhorse half-fridges, opened up a new case of sanitized glasses and deposited vials of miracle shampoo-conditioner on the shower ledges. It was a time of woe for mildew. He and Josie laid new carpet, they went down on their knees and into the silverfish. As Benny waits in the office, vacantly eyeing the sports scores, he hopes that all the reservations actually show; he borrowed money from the bank in Hinton to pay for all the improvements. If all the reservations arrive, it will be the first time he and Josie have reached full occupancy. The only time the No in the Vacancy sign had ever been illuminated was when Benny and Josie went to Acapulco for six days and seven nights for their wedding anniversary. To compensate for their venture’s lack of history, Josie arbitrarily declares certain rooms Honeymoon Suites or haunted, but often forgets which is which, and sometimes she places a happy couple in a room with the ghost and is sick about it all night. Benny has had to restrain her physically from knocking on doors at 3 A.M. and telling guests to move two doors down.
Things have picked up in the last few years on account of the growing popularity of the dam and the lake. The Sandman and Coast to Coast gather most of the river traffic because they are closer to Hinton, but Benny and Josie catch their overflow. Strategically placed signs every quarter of a mile lure and tease. Local teens like to shoot buckshot at them. The Talcott Motor Lodge is a cozy budget motel off Route 3, but still proximate enough to the sights that tourists think that by staying there they are making some ingenious decision, distinguishing themselves from the other loudmouths of the tourist fray. The summer people swagger into the office damp and tired, sunburned and drained, tracking sand through the carpet. Always that detail: Benny imagines the grains jumping like fleas from the battlements of sneaker treads. The sand collects stubbornly between the bathroom tile, its sects flourish unpersecuted under carpet cover. The families are noise and the kids chase each other around the pool and slip and he can smell the litigation like coming rain. (He remembers then that he has forgotten to fill the pool, but it is too late to do anything about it, some of the guests have already arrived.) They demand amenities he and Josie cannot possibly provide. They are numerous and crack up the gravel in steady numbers, but he has never filled the place. Today, their place has advance reservations for every single room.
In room 29, Lawrence Flittings sits nude on the bed rubbing scented oils into his skin. It is a ritual he performs near the full moon that makes him feel more comfortable in his body.
In room 12, Alphonse Miggs brushes his finger along the bottom of the bathtub and contemplates the residue of abrasive cleanser powdering his fingertip.
Benny doesn’t like the new posters. The Chamber of Commerce delivered the John Henry posters last week and he removed some of the pictures of the New River Gorge—a laughing family on a raft, the great Gorge Bridge striding across angry water—from the reception area as instructed. After staring at them over the last few days, his initial reaction has not changed. Benny finds the festival posters a little too garish. He is in the spirit of things; it is difficult to remain unmoved by the optimism of the town, and there’s a good chance the events of the next few days will yield regular guests for his rooms in the long run. When Jack Cliff ran into him on the street and asked him if he was on board, Benny said, looking forward to it, Jack. But the posters seem so violent to him. The flashing sparks and sweat, John Henry’s heaving black body. Josie loves them of course; they are typical of the town’s railroad romance. Can’t sit in a bar for ten minutes without some Joe going on about how their engineer grandfather did this or that. The wreck of old something or other. It isn’t so glorious to Benny. The towns around here wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for the C&O, but a lot of people died laying track through the mountain. The cave-ins and dynamite. His neighbors, his wife, love all those violent stories. And for what. Look at it now. It’s Amtrak, its CXS Transportation hauling crap from coast to coast. That’s what he has to fight back saying ten times a day. It’s just Amtrak.
In room 17, Dave Brown cleans out his thermos.
In room 27, J. Sutter sleeps and dreams of a blizzard of receipts, a million fluttering tallies that he captures on his tongue.
Benny looks at his rack of room keys, remembers screwing the hooks into the plasterboard. Each hook is a room and all the people who will stay there for a time. Lives converge on those hooks.
This weekend is going to be good for the town: that phrase is the going rate. Before his retirement, Josie’s father had been a station man in Hinton for thirty years. They are railroad towns, Hinton and Talcott, and everybody who lives here has railroad in their bloodline. Not so Benny, whose family moved to Talcott when he was a teenager for reasons he still does not understand. He feels out of place when confronted with the railroad nostalgia of the two towns, that is to say nearly every waking moment. But as he waits for the next guest to arrive, he thinks perhaps he is learning to understand the mythology of his adopted home. He is learning what it is to wait for a train.
No one, it seems, wants to go (#ulink_a7c6933e-545f-5175-ae02-45f248e4b4ee) to West Virginia. West Virginia contains many natural wonders. The New River Gorge is spectacular. A number of the bituminous coal concerns have informative tours and dioramas for the curious visitor. The historic stand at Harpers Ferry, to name another thing. And yet. Just last week at a bar on M Street in Washington, D.C., an inquisitive patron could have overheard this conversation between two postal employees:
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
Pittsburgh I wouldn’t mind. It’s a big city. I have a college roommate in Pittsburgh.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
I don’t know why they picked John Henry in the first place.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
You know. They got three white ones, you gotta mix it up these days. Nothing against John Henry. I just wish he was from somewhere else.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan—who’s the other guy?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
Mighty Casey.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
(sipping lager)
“Casey at the Bat.” I don’t even know who Pecos Bill is.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
(gritting his teeth)
Nobody knows who the fuck Pecos Bill is. He wrestled a rattlesnake.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
You got Babe the Blue Ox in the Paul Bunyan one?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
That’s exactly what I said. What’s Paul Bunyan without Babe the Blue Ox? But we just did an animal series a few months ago.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
(nodding ruefully)
To take care of the animal lovers. We don’t want to alienate that segment of stamp consumers. Not in Marvin Runyon’s Post Office. Whose idea was this anyway for a Folk Hero series?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
Who do you think?
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Yeah.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
(shaking his head)
And he wants some target marketing people to go along. You know his big thing now. I don’t know why it has to be me, but there you have it. I know the beds are going to kill me. I can feel that already. My back is fucking killing me already. It’s enough to make me go—
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
(looking over his shoulder)
Don’t say it!
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say, go nuts. I actually talked to the son of a bitch mayor of the town. We got a registered letter from the Chamber of Commerce. They sent a registered letter to the Post Office like it’s some kind of threat. The Post Office! They go, “Pittsburgh may be Steeltown U.S.A., but John Henry is Talcott’s native son.” So he gave in, canceled all the Pittsburgh plans that had already been planned out. Christ, this city is a fucking sewer in the summertime.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
It’ll be good for you to get out of the city. Get some good country air.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
Why does everyone keep saying that? Country air, country air, everywhere I go. Watch me get a call from some guy in Minnesota saying we got to do the same thing there for Paul Bunyan. “An office of the United States Government can’t show unfair treatment blah blah.”
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
I have some “relations” as they say, in West Virginia.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
(rubbing a cigarette burn on the bar’s surface)
They’re trying to use the John Henry thing to make the town into a tourist trap. The stamp gave them the idea apparently. All sorts of big fun.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Tractor pull. Hayride.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
They got Ben Vereen coming.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
(grinning)
Pulling out all the stops. Look at it this way—you get to hang out with the stamp collectors.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
That’s a pleasure.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
You can look forward to that.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
They always got those moist lips.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
They’re always licking their lips because they got all those stamps but they can’t lick ‘em.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
Turns my stomach.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
They always try to be your best friend.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
Like I’m going to give them free stamps.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Like we got stamps in our pockets that we’re going to give them. Maybe the Weirdo is going.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:
If the Weirdo is there, fuck Runyon, I’m turning back.
POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:
Shit yeah.
(gesturing)
Can we get another round?
Everything on him is free. His black (#ulink_ad9d1b6b-49c0-59aa-99d6-e7e27d1caf1e) Calvin Klein jeans hard won two years prior at a party celebrating the famous designer’s spring line. Stacks and stacks of the jeans, up to the ceiling, but more pertinent than the company’s publicity budget was the fear they might not have brought your size, or another journalist might beat you to your size, thus the resultant frenzy described the next day in Page Six of the New York Post. His T-shirt arrived in the mail one day with an advance copy of Public Enemy’s latest release. Mickey Mouse heads festooned his socks, Goofy his boxer shorts. His shoes bounty from a Michael Jordan–Nike charity event, intended for the disadvantaged kids but everybody helped themselves so J. figured why not. They are a little tight, and pinch.
J. rummages through his canvas bag for some new clothes. They had been washed by Laundry in the hotel he’d stayed at the night before and charged to his hotel bill, which was in turn picked up by the record company that had invited him there. There is always an entity at the top who pays for things. While sifting through his bag, J. notices a log of tissue paper and opens it up. He remembers: at the end of the night he’d wrapped up a small ham sandwich from the food table to save for breakfast. One time he woke up with dozens of cocktail napkins in his pockets, all stuffed down in there. He pulled out the dingy bouquets from his trousers like a hobo magician. The sandwich still looks edible. J. picks off the dried brown edges from the ham, considers for a moment the wilted iceberg lettuce, and sticks the sandwich in his maw. He starts to feel better.
Strung out from the gin and tonic and the nap dream, which was antic and enervating and which he cannot recall, he wonders what time it is, how long he slept. The desk man at the motel gave him a press packet when he registered, checking his name off a list, but J. hasn’t bothered to look at it so he doesn’t know what time dinner is. It is still light out. Someone will come fetch him. Out of boredom he picks up the glossy folder of the press material. In a golden circle, John Henry pounds a railroad spike with a gigantic hammer. He has a big grin on his face. Behind him the other workers are bent over the track, small and human compared to the black titan in the foreground. Building the country mile by mile. This is the forging of a nation. This is some real hokey shit.
After the knock on his door, he hears Lawrence call his name. He reluctantly opens the door for the publicity man. Lawrence Flittings is tall and boyish, attired with his usual elegance in a light blue summer suit. Current New York style straight out of the lifestyle mags; a subscription card could fall from his navel at any moment. His blond hair is compact and slicked back with a particularly obedient mousse, considering the Southern humidity. He smiles at J., green eyes penetrating, and says, “I’m glad you could make it, J. Get here okay?”
Lawrence is a lieutenant at Lucien Joyce Associates, one of the most influential publicity firms in the country. Have their hands in everything from home electronics to beauty products to independent movies, an interdisciplinary and gangster army of hype. They’d publicize the debut twitch of a bean sprout, an unspectacular bud in a field of identical bean sprouts, if the money was right. Lawrence is Lucien’s new right-hand man, replacing Chester, who is now in Development at Paramount. J. still runs into Chester at various events. Chester enthuses about his new job profusely and at length. The man has yet to connive one of his projects into the multiplexes; the scripts in question endure successive drafts, gain talent, lose talent, find new talent and sigh through more drafts. Chester draws up budgets, revises, revises again to accommodate the new people who have come aboard, and then the new people lose interest and the budgets are revised again. He is highly regarded and considered successful.
J. has yet to warm up to Lawrence. He still sees him as the new guy, a judgment that flatters J. somewhere because he has been around for so long. J. tells him he arrived without incident.
“How have you been? I haven’t seen you since the Maverick Records event.”
“The usual. Working a lot.”
“I loved that piece about Whitney Houston. You’re so clever.”
“Thank you, Lawrence.”
“I’m not the only one who thinks so, J.,” Lawrence says, spinning the valve. The publicity man proceeds to name publicists and personages whose events J. has attended on his recent junketeering streak, the ones who have fed and housed J. over the last few months. J. thinks it is his way of saying, I know what you’re up to. A smug little display of Lawrence’s power, a momentary adumbration of the inner chambers. And another indicator that Lucien controls the List. As J. dangles in the door frame and listens to Lawrence’s spiel, he makes a note to share this tidbit with One Eye, should One Eye show up this weekend.
J. nods and listens to Lawrence explain about the shuttle bus that will ferry them to the dinner venue in Pipestem, a resort town a few miles south. J. admits that he hasn’t had a chance to look at the press material yet.
“Unfortunately,” Lawrence frowns, almost sincerely, “I just talked to Ben Vereen’s people and they told me he won’t be able to attend tonight’s dinner. He’s taken ill, apparently. But the town people have lined up some local talent instead, so it should be splendid. It won’t be the Puck Building, of course, but I think you and the boys will enjoy yourselves.”
“I’m sure we will. I don’t suppose Lucien is coming down here, is he?”
Lawrence smiles. “He’s flying in tomorrow morning, actually. He’s very anxious to see how this turns out. We’ve never done a whole town before. And we’ve worked with the government, but not the Post Office. We’re all very excited. I’ll tell him you asked about him.” Lawrence pretends to glance at his watch. Duty done, time for the kiss-off. “I’ll let you go, J., I’m sure you must be exhausted.”
J. closes the door and is disappointed that there are only two locks. That bit about J. being exhausted—was that another dig at his junketeering streak? Streak, jag, binge. He crawls on top of the bed, swiping the publicity folder to the floor. He can expect Dave to make a few Bobby Figgis jokes at dinner. Junketeer jokes and junketeer chuckles all around the table. Public shame to reinforce their community’s values. But behind the jokes there will be their very real discomfort with what he is doing. J. wishes he’d gotten the official lowdown from Lawrence on the exact nature of dinner.
He tries to remember why he started. He sees himself kissing Monica the Publicist at the Barbie event. They were on the second floor of FAO Schwarz in a display of radio-controlled toys. His hand moved down the back of her black publicity dress and he heard a whirring sound. The toys were active, autonomous rambunction, tanks mostly, with a few hot rods from the future thrown in the mix. The robots collided with each other and spun off. They ran into the bottom of shelves and got caught there, unable to understand why they could not progress. They let out whines of frustration. She bit into his tongue and he tasted his blood. The next evening he went to a TNT event for their latest Civil War movie, where he dined from a menu of authentic Confederate Army rations. It was kitschy. Everyone dug it and made ironic comments. The day after that he went to the Palladium to see the hot new band from England and the next thing he knew he was going for the record.
It has been six months since her (#ulink_37003f70-7d17-562d-adac-19b3e970bb0b) father passed away, and she feels she may be ready to say good-bye to him. His remains are in storage.
Her father has been dead six months, but she isn’t sure if she is able to make the final step and take care of the items in the storage facility.
Six months after his funeral, it is time to bury her father. The monthly storage fees are a bitch.
It is the first time Pamela Street has been out of the city in two years. She pulls the curtain string, looks out on the quiet grass and cement walkways in front of the Talcott Motor Lodge, looks past the blue slit of the empty swimming pool to the soup line of begging trees, and decides it is a welcome change from the air shaft that howls outside the window of her studio apartment. At this time of year the air shaft rattles with the exertions of air conditioners, reeks with the cooking exhaust of the Chinese takeout place on the first floor of the building. The smoke from below grits the yellow bricks of the air shaft black and brown, decrees the windows de facto antiwindows, portholes onto a sea of grease. She cracks the window of room 14. This is an honest to God breeze.
The funeral was the easy part. There was a mechanism of loss in place, the Yellow Pages were handy. The funeral salesmen brandished multiple-choice sheets, coffin make, viewing rooms by rank, appendixes referring affiliated firms that specialized in exotic disposal if you wanted to scatter the deceased’s ashes into the sea near Ellis Island or out an airplane window circling over Coney Island. That was the easy part, the funeral salesmen were kind and efficient shepherds. But Mr. Street inconveniently died in the last week of the month, which left Pamela only a few days to take care of his things. His landlord, a ballbusting wretch of long standing, had been firm on this point, keen as he was on chopping the newly vacant apartment into two separate units. Pamela returned to the Yellow Pages to find a storage facility for her father’s remains.
Pamela took trains and buses to the edges of New York City. There are rules about the placement of storage facilities, zoning laws. Many have enjoyed former lives as warehouses for industries that no longer exist or have relocated to more appropriate locations outside the city. The reconditioned warehouses now serve as repositories for things of no immediate purpose but infinite unquantifiable value. If you want to know what a person is about, all you have to do is look at what they put in storage. The superannuated but too expensive to throw away. Crates of illegal revolvers. Children who have moved away to start their own lives and have affixed their favors on new objects find their childhood possessions put in storage by parents who wait for their return. People move into new, smaller apartments and exile their too-much stuff into patient solitude until the day of their improved fortunes. People disappear into the world and leave clues in storage. In storage is optimism, everything temporary and defined, it promises a reversal of destiny and yet speaks in the dull syllables of finality, has the eloquence of a cemetery. Occasionally people remember an object during blank afternoons in their new kitchenettes, seek after it, realize that it is in storage and know it is gone forever. The possessions of the dead find their way into the gigantic and solemn storage facilities of New York City, interred there by family and attended by dust.
Pamela met the caretakers, fat cigar-smoking men who had no time for questions. They kept their eyes on the loading doors, greeted movers whom they had come to know during the course of their mutual interest in other people’s things, scolded do-it-yourselfers who stared dumbfounded at the freight elevator doors. No one rushed her when she said she’d have to think about it and get back to them; they understood the traffic of their enterprise and knew there were others after her, just as there were others before her. Men in brown uniforms obligingly gave her tours of the spaces, asked her if she wanted nine-by-eleven or seven-by-five and directed her down dark corridors, switching on hanging bulbs at every turn. They brushed aside the lights’ strings as if they were cobwebs. The men illuminated storage rooms that resembled the interiors of ancient ovens. Some rooms had doors that slid up and down, others had walls of metal grating that allowed her to see the other bins, the stuff of other people, bicycles of dead children, histories of upholstery, lamps from bolder decades, dartboards and family portraits. She couldn’t judge spaces. They asked her if she was storing a studio or a one-bedroom or a two-bedroom, and she told them she was storing a museum.
After visiting a dozen storage places, Pamela decided on Dalmon, which is only two blocks from her house. Only two blocks away her neighborhood changes; Tenth Avenue broods near the river, where the city has different priorities. Dalmon has reasonable rates and even offered to move the material for her, at a small cost. It is very convenient. She met the movers the following Saturday at her father’s apartment in Harlem. The movers were two young Dominican men who smiled a lot at her throughout the job, nice guys. She showed them the boxes that contained her father’s John Henry museum and they urged dollies up the brownstone steps, coaxed carts through door frames, gouged walls. Pamela left the furniture, the plates, the rest of her father’s things for the landlord to clean up, fuck him. The movers drove their van downtown and banished the boxes from her immediate responsibility.
No one wanted it. She made a few inquiries, called universities. Tuskeegee, Howard. She got lost in voice mail, mailed letters that did not receive responses.
She stalled out that spring. Pamela temped aimlessly, a migrant worker harvesting words per minute. The agency called her early in the morning if they had anything for her; otherwise she watched television in her pajamas and contemplated the bills from the storage facility, which distilled her hatred for John Henry into a convenient monthly statement.
Haunted by stuff. Hunched over ramen, in the same clothes she’d worn for days, she felt dazed. She was on the patch. She was off the patch. She was on the gum and smoking in between. She didn’t go out that much, partly because she couldn’t afford to, partly because going out did nothing for her mood. Her friends understood, her friends told her it was natural. It was part of the grieving process. Therapy diffuses: everyone knew the cant, the correct diagnosis. It was natural. It had nothing to do with her father, however, it had to do with John Henry, the original sheet music of ballads, railroad hammers, spikes and bits, playbills from the Broadway production, statues of the man and speculative paintings.
She thought about not paying the bills. When Dalmon finally unloaded the stuff (there must be auctions for such things, an entire culture based on the commerce of the dead or bankrupt, what did they do with what they bought), it would be like they were selling John Henry, not her father. This argument never got very far in her head. It was her father. She paid the bills on time and stopped eating out as much.
In May Pamela received a call from a representative of the town of Talcott, West Virginia. The months after her father’s death marked the longest stretch in her life that she had not heard the name. The woman on the phone was very kind. The town was planning a festival to celebrate their town and John Henry and wanted to know if they could buy her father’s collection of material. She hated the name Talcott and refused, even though it was the obvious solution to her dilemma. The woman, Arlene, was persistent but Pamela did not budge. It wasn’t a matter of money; they made a generous offer. She knew there were reasons, probably pertaining to the so-called grieving process, that she did not want to relinquish her burden.
In the end the matter was decided by the arrival of a handsome invitation from the Talcott Chamber of Commerce. Perhaps a few days out of the city would help her make up her mind.
J. catches up with Dave Brown in (#ulink_c45909c9-c856-5359-99d5-2aa8669473c0) the parking lot of the Talcott Motor Lodge. The night is clear and naked and swarming with so many anxious stars that it almost seems to him an invasion, a celestial troop movement auguring nothing good. In the cities it is safe because there are no stars, the light from a million apartment windows provides protection: they reduce the night into a vast purple mediocrity shielding against higher thought. J. nods at Dave, who is suited up in his bulging khaki jacket. Dave starts, “I think that in all my years of freelancing, I have never been to West Virginia. I’ve been all through Europe, South America. I saw Ali take out Frazier in the Thrilla in Manila—remind me to tell you about that sometime—I was one of the first people to interview Vaclav Havel—we talked about Lou Reed. The U.S.S.R., former U.S.S.R., Brazil, whatever. But I don’t think I’ve ever been to West Virginia.”
“Clear night,” J. says.
“Clear now,” Dave responds. “But that’s weather for you.”
“What’s up, Dave? Hey, Bobby Figgis.”
They turn to see Tiny and Frenchie, two fellow mercenaries in their covert war against the literate of America. Hail, hail. They encounter each other on the newsstands, they chafe against one another in the contributors’ notes of glossy magazines, but primarily they meet like this, on the eve of war, hungry, sniffing comps and gratis, these things like smoke from a freebie battlefield on the other side of morning. At stake: the primal American right of free speech, the freedom, without fear of censor, to beguile, confuse and otherwise distract the people into plodding obeisance of pop. Their ideals: the holy inviolability of the receipt, two dollars a word, travel expenses. The junketeers are soldiers, and they hail each other. “What’s up, Dave? Hey, Bobby Figgis.”
“I hope you don’t mind that I told Tiny about your streak,” Dave says. “I ran into him at the ice machine earlier.”
J. shrugs. He appraises his comrades. “Tiny, Frenchie. Good to see you.” The law of nicknames: contradictory or supremely apt, born of accidents and sticking for life or arbitrary and annoying. Tiny, of course, is not; he earned his nickname by not being so. At three hundred pounds, the man is hunger, gorging and grazing at the free spreads of life. If any person deserves to be on the List, it is Tiny, a creature who has evolved into the perfect mooching machine, leaving no glass undrained or napkin unstained by chicken skewer residue. He sucks up freebies in a banquet room like a baleen whale inhaling colonies of hapless plankton, swooping primeval and perfect, eyelids blinking slowly in the unlit fathoms of media. The dirigible prowls the food and travel magazine circuit; as a party trick he has been known to throw darts at a map of the world and name a princely dish native to that region, belching up its flavor on command, an archival gust from deep in his belly. Not to mention his thoroughly unwholesome fascination with curry.
Frenchie, for his part, retains an accent from his internment at a French boarding school during his adolescence. His parents were world-traveling sophisticates who unloaded their offspring with paid attendants half the year; the migrant’s ways are in his blood. Tall and slender, proud owner of a shiny black mane, this lipless wonder has cultivated a satisfied Parisian air that serves him well while playing footsie with the editors of women’s fashion magazines. For the world of international fashion is Frenchie’s specialty, he knows where to buy rice cakes and had been linked in the gossip pages to that new Italian runway model before she discovered her bisexuality. She appeared to evaporate with every step and was perceived to be the marvelous avatar of a current brand of beauty. Frenchie took his expulsion from the empyrean badly; he had ascended from reporter-of to reported-upon, his name inflated in bold type among the gossip ledgers, and now he is back in the trenches. The other junketeers saw it coming; those they write about are not their kind, and mixing with them can only lead to heartbreak.
“No sign of the van?” Frenchie asks. He looks down at his suit and, distressed, returns the tips of his shirt collar to the outside of his jacket, where they sit like the wings of a shiny red bird.
“Should be here any minute,” Dave says.
They are joined in the parking lot by a lithe young woman who is clearly not from around here; it is in her walk, a rapid skitter that places her from New York City. J. has found himself trying to slow down ever since he arrived at Yeager Airport, to get into the groove and pace of the state as a sign of openness to a different culture. The woman looks down the driveway and lights a cigarette. Waiting, like them, but no reporter. J. and his fellow junketeers are in Talcott (or just outside it, he doesn’t know) because they have committed to a lifestyle: their lifestyle pays air freight and they board planes. But why is she here? She wears faded jeans, a yellow blouse with a flower embroidered over her heart. She shifts in her boots, stamps out half a cigarette and lights another while the junketeers shoot the shit and catch up.
“It’s not here yet?” Lawrence fumes, emerging from the office with a cell phone limp in his hand, no doubt making comparisons between the publicity apparatus here and in New York and L.A. They don’t know how to do things here. “The van was supposed to be here ten minutes ago.”
“Patience, Lawrence,” Dave says.
Lawrence presses a few numbers into his phone, to beeps.
“We used to read the story of John Henry in kindergarten,” Tiny says. “The school board told the teachers they couldn’t teach Little Black Sambo anymore, so they switched over to this picture book of John Henry’s competition. Positive imagery.”
“You sound disappointed,” J. says, glancing quickly at the woman for her reaction.
“I was, a little. I don’t mean to be un-p.c.,” Tiny says. He is the kind of man who says, “I don’t mean to be un-p.c.” a lot. “But I liked Little Black Sambo. My mother used to read me Little Black Sambo when she tucked me into bed at night. It’s a cute story underneath.”
“You were undisturbed by the eyeholes cut out of the pillow you lay your little head on.”
“They were different times, J.”
“Did you hear I got a new job?”
“What?”
“It’s at the department of no one gives a shit and you’re my first client.”
“Here it comes now,” Frenchie says.
The battered blue van pulls up, New River Gorge Taxi stenciled on its side. It looks like it has been tossed by tornadoes. Workhorse of the robust fleet, J. says to himself. The driver, a ruddy-faced chap from the nabe, rolls down the window and asks, “You all going to the Millhouse Inn?” His brown, glinting hair is tucked precariously behind his tiny ears.
“All hacks in the back,” Tiny says, already steering his body into the back row. Frenchie climbs in next to him, makes a joke about there not being enough room in the seat for him. J. is pressed between Dave and the young woman. She’s coming with them. Now he isn’t the only black person. J. is grateful. If anything goes down in this cannibal region, he thinks, she will send word, and the story of J.’s martyrdom will live on in black fable.
”You’re not coming?” Dave asks Lawrence, his hand on the door.
“I have my own car,” he says.
“Big shot,” Tiny mumbles as the van starts.
The chatter of the junketeers fills the van. They talk about who showed up at the party at the Fashion Café two weeks before and not one among them can remember what movie it promoted; about the night they attended the book party for the hot new memoir, something about a rough childhood, how they swooped down on the stack of review copies and the next day all ran into each other at the Strand bookstore, laughing at the coincidence, as they sold the review copies for cash. Tiny gloats over the money he gets for selling the cookbooks that arrive every day in his mailbox: The Art of Southern Indian Cuisine, Tuscany Delight, The Master Crepe. Tiny says, you can’t eat recipes.
The woman’s arm digs into J.’s side. She smiles an apology but does not speak. Maybe he’ll talk to her at the dinner, so what brings you down here from the big city? How did I know? I could tell. J. closes his eyes to gather himself for the next few hours. Shut down for a bit before whatever god awful festivities are ahead of him. His stomach chews on itself loudly and he hopes that no one else hears it. Then he hears honking and the van lurches to the side. Peering through the windshield he sees the vehicle trying to run them off the road, the red pickup truck of his nightmares. So much depends upon a red pickup truck, filled with crackers. The pickup swerves in the lane parallel to them, dipping and zigging. The man in the passenger seat waves his pink fist out the window at them. Both drivers pounding their horns feverishly. “What the fuck is this! What the fuck is this!” Dave yells. They are being run off the road. Here it comes, J. thinks, this is how it goes down. The van capsized in a ditch. Open the door, I said open the damn door. What chew all doin’ ridin’ with nigruhs? We don’t abide no consortin’ with nigruhs in Summers County. Get out the car. Maybe one of his comrades puts up a little resistance against the taking of J. and the young lady. Then the ropes, the guns, the fire. The South will kill you.
“Slow down, slow down,” Frenchie says. “It’s all right.”
“Are you fucking crazy?” the young woman shrieks. J. thinking, now she speaks.
“No, it’s okay,” Dave reassures, pointing out the window. “It’s a friend of ours.” And indeed, J. sees, the man in the passenger seat is none other than One Eye, come in from the cold.
“You know these men?” the driver asks.
“Sure, just pull over,” Dave says. “It’ll only take a second.”
“You’re the boss,” the driver says, easing into the shoulder. The pickup pulls up in front of them and One Eye hops out, a scrambling, scarecrow figure with a short brown buzzcut. He is dressed like an idiot, with gray cloth trousers held up by red suspenders over a white striped shirt. A black eyepatch conceals his left eye.
One Eye removes his two black suitcases from the back of the pickup and offers a farewell to the man in the front seat before the red pickup takes off down the road. One Eye looks in the van and scrabbles into the passenger seat next to the driver, who shakes his head and frowns.
“What’s up, fellows?” One Eye says. “I saw Tiny’s fat fucking head in the window and knew it must be you.”
“You had your one eye peeled,” Tiny says.
“The great Cyclops,” Frenchie adds.
“My plane was late and my ride had already left,” One Eye explains. “So I hitched with Johnson there, figuring I’d catch up with you at the Millhouse.”
“You’re lucky Johnson had to run into town to buy some dry goods,” Dave chuckles. Dave Brown—what could you do with Dave Brown? It is inert, the name just lays there, as resistible as his prose. His name does not lend itself to nickname shenanigans, playful permutations.
“He was a nice guy,” One Eye says, cracking his knuckles. “More than I can say for you all. This is one sorry crew. No offense, ma’am, I’m not talking about you. Dave, of course, it wouldn’t be a junket without Dave. Being down South must bring back memories of being on tour with the Allman Brothers, huh? Yes, we all miss Duane, it was a terrible loss. Tiny, of course, thought he could wrassle up some alligator fritters. Sorry to burst your bubble, Tiny, but we’re a little north of weezie-ana. Frenchie, fuck you, I don’t know about you, but J., poor J., I had such high hopes for you.”
“He’s our inspiration,” Tiny pipes in.
“The great black hope,” Frenchie says.
“Exactly. I had such high hopes. New York, New York. Wine, women and pop songs. And I find you here.”
“He’s going for the record,” Dave offers.
“Tsk, tsk,” One Eye shaking his head. “You can’t see, but I’m making the station of the cross and praying for the soul of Bobby Figgis. Say it isn’t so, J.”
J., his name truncated to a single initial during childhood, does not need a nickname. “I’m on a jag,” he says. He is a little embarrassed about how all their bullshitting appears to the woman next to him.
“Nonstop since April,” Dave says, happy to be finally getting in his little digs before a proper audience. “Three-month bid.”
“Three months in,” One Eye says, taking stock, “Figgis was a wreck. You seem to be holding up.”
“Jag.”
“Hit an event every day,” Frenchie counters. “He’s going for the record.”
“How’s the book coming, Frenchie?” One Eye suddenly on J.’s side. If you wanted to shut Frenchie up, a quick rapier thrust to his ambition did the trick. Frenchie had spent his advance on clothes and lifestyle years before, without delivering word one of his manuscript, thus urging his comrades’ initial envy to curdle into warming superiority, and then well-timed derision. If he wanted sympathy he should have never written those Talk of the Towns for the New Yorker, a sure friendship-killer in the freelance world. Frenchie does not say anything; One Eye’s shiv dispatched him to the site of his more recent failure, to the bed he shared with his lost Italian model, her lost thighs.
One Eye had been blinded in a tragic ironic quotes accident a few years before. As he sat on a couch chatting with a publicist, a young freelancer stood above him, relating a droll tale of Manhattan mores as expressed in a new collection of short stories by that month’s photogenic young writer. The bartender yelled out last call for the open bar, and One Eye jumped up on instinct, just as the freelancer punctuated his clever description by forming air quotations with the index and forefingers of his hands. The point in question was apparently very ironic, requiring a vigorous expression of the ironic quotes. The force of the irony, coupled with One Eye’s eager and frantic upward movement, drove the freelancer’s pincer fingers deep into the junketeer’s eye socket.
J. reaches over and snaps One Eye’s suspenders. “Where did you dig this up?”
“This is my Huck Finn outfit. I’m trying to gain trust, blend in.”
“You look like an idiot.”
“I know.”
“Couldn’t miss this one, eh? Where are you coming from?”
“Florida. I was visiting my parents.”
“Okay time?”
“It’s Florida.”
“Figured you’d stop on down here for some more Southern hospitality.”
“I’m on a secret mission,” One Eye says. His good eye winks mysteriously. “A mission that could very well change the course of human events.”
“It’s hush-hush.”
“I’ll tell you about it later,” One Eye murmurs. He turns back to face the road. He isn’t kidding, J. thinks.
“I can’t wait to see Ben Vereen,” Tiny says.
“He canceled,” J. informs him.
“What, creative differences?”
“No, he’s sick,” J. says, and the van continues its approach to the Millhouse Inn.
The List possessed a will and function (#ulink_34418fdb-2a19-5f9e-b812-2717c4bffc76). It sensed a need for itself, for an assemblage of likely suspects to get the word out. A group of men and women who could be called upon in times of need, individuals of good character and savvy, individuals who understood the pitch of the times. And the pitch of the Times. The public needed to know about the things that were being created by capable interests, a hunger existed among the public for the word, all that was needed was a reliable system to get the information to them. The List recognized the faces of itself: they turned out in bad weather, tired and hungry, night after night. Sometimes the ones who came got the word out; other times they took a few hours’ reprieve from the chaos, a free meal and trinkets. The ultimate percentage was the thing that mattered, the unconquerable ratio of events covered to events not covered, that was the final concern.
The List pondered the faces of itself and reached out. The List kept abreast of the latest advances in information technology, contacting its charges by mail, later by fax, then email, whichever medium was most appropriate. The men and women on the List were astonished to find themselves contacted by email, having only just signed up for an email account a few days before and not having given their new email address to many people. They did not complain. It was convenient. If they wondered about the mechanism of the List, they kept their concern to themselves, or voiced it in low tones, during private moments. They feared expulsion. There had been a few cases of those who had abused the gift. One went mad. Another stopped filing and only showed up to eat from the banquet without giving in return. For the sin of not searching for outlets in which to deliver the word, this latter individual was deleted from the List and eventually became an editor. He looked at his colleagues from the outside, invited to only a fraction of the events he had been invited to before, and all remembered the look in his eyes.
The List was just. The List saw a discoloration on its person, watched as the discoloration described a face, and the face was added to the List. The faces the List plucked from its body were surprised. Some were new to the game, others old hands bitter for being overlooked for so long. Some appeared with much effort, others easy as pie. Some tried to figure out which event or article had been key, the one that blessed and graduated them, the one that had proved their worthiness. It was to no end. Shmoozers were passed over and the quiet diligent welcomed; the reverse was true just as often. It was inscrutable.
The List had been pushed from the earth by tectonic forces. The List possessed a specific gravity measurable by scientific instruments. The List contained weight and volume.
The List was aware of those in its charge. It knew if writers moved, switched from this newspaper to that magazine, if they died or retired, and updated itself accordingly. The men and women of the List were surprised at the promptness of the List’s readjustment, but only the first time. After that first time they were surprised at nothing. Contact names were updated with military precision. The publicity firm rolls were never obsolete. If a bouncer at a club quit, or went to jail, or moved to a different club, his replacement was noted and identified to eliminate possible embarrassment. The quirks and pet names of maître d’s at the popular restaurants were indexed. A harmony was achieved.
And the List rewarded the world. The percentage was maintained. Cover stories with witty headlines. Short and long reviews in the back of the book. Profiles of stars and magnates and web geniuses, insightful questions, silly questions, questions that begged still further questions, column inches adding up, fodder for the next iteration of the press packet. The public figure and the private citizen were rewarded. Those with dead careers walked among the living, resuscitated by a press release and attendant event at an appropriate venue. A financier who had done nothing real to speak of lately save collect interest threw a party to inform the public he was still alive. Around the Christmas shopping season a new gadget perched on a black pedestal, product of prodigious intellect, its virtues enumerated by those who had received it for free. The great ebb and flow of need, chronicled, subscribed to. A comeback. A meteoric rise. A next big thing, jostling for position in a year-end double issue. The reclusive author breaks her silence and grants interviews to justify her grandiose advance. The precocious upstart seen at the right parties. Behind the scenes at the award ceremony. The triumphant return. The inner life of. The secret world. The stories were told. There was a need. The List facilitated.
This inveigler of invites and slayer of (#ulink_fbea28c7-74f7-5526-9ac3-0ed53b359003) crudités, this drink ticket fondler and slim tipper, open bar opportunist, master of vouchers, queue-jumping wrangler of receipts, goes by the name of J. Sutter, views the facade of the Millhouse Inn through reptilian eyes.
Is he supposed to take this place seriously? The walls of the rustic hotel and restaurant are obviously some factory concoction, J. sees that from yards away, the ridges and pocks identical from stone to stone. He can’t figure out what style its designers tried to effect, colonial flourishes abut antebellum wood columns, modern double-pane windows nestle in artificially weathered frames of molting paint. Nice attempt by the toddler ivy along the walls, but hell, he discerns the wire firming it in place. But the water wheel is the biggest atrocity. The fountain jets force water over slats that do not move, the spray energetic and process of no natural movement, splashing into a cement pool lousy with plastic lily pads floating moronically, congregating near the drainage grate. Snug up against a hill, this establishment totally new, intended to service the legions of tourists who will flock here now for John Henry Days. They hope. A hipster kid with more hooks in his face than some ancient, uncatchable fish, strutting down Soho in seventies’ bell-bottoms, has more period authenticity than this place. What is he doing here? He is going for the record, his works gurgling with slow, heavy fluids.
First things first when they hit the Social Room. Objective One: find a base of operations. Most of the tables had already been colonized by the other factions, but there is Frenchie tracking ahead, wading between chairs before the rest of them have finished taking stock of the room, on point, surveying, dithering a little between two tables to the far left of the podium before dropping his bag on one and motioning the other junketeers over. He nods to himself, second-guessing his choice, but no, this is it, this table is definitely it. As J. and the rest march to join him, they progress to Objective Two, libations, scanning the joint as they advance on their seats. Two bartenders barely out of their teens work their alchemy in a corner under ferns. John Henry Days employment largesse stealing labor from the fast food outlets, J. surmises. The junketeers take their seats and dispatch Tiny and Dave for drinks. A few citizens of Talcott and Hinton hover around the bar, but there is an opening on the left flank, a chink where Tiny or Dave might weasel in and dominate.
“I don’t see a cash register,” One Eye comments, sipping water.
“Me either,” J. seconds.
These are some real white people, J. thinks, looking around. These people go into hair salons armed with pictures of stars on CBS television shows and demand. He is out of his element. He discovers the food table on the other side of the room. Looks like salad to start. His stomach grumbles again but he decides he can wait until the boys come back with the drinks. Bit of a line anyway. J. notices that the woman in the van has chosen a different table. Probably a good choice to keep her distance.
The drinks arrive, dock, find berth in waiting palms. Frenchie sniffs, asks, “This Gordon’s or what?”
Tiny shakes his head. “No, tonight they’re breaking out the good stuff. I asked the guy if he had any moonshine and he just looked at me. Was that un-p.c. of me?”
“Obviously you haven’t heard of the great Talcott Moonshine War of Thirty-three,” One Eye says over the rim of his glass. “You’re stirring up old wounds.”
J. has forgotten that afternoon’s vomit incident but then he smells the gin. Bubbles break against his nose. He figures the ham sandwich he discovered in his suitcase has settled his stomach a bit. “Cheers,” he says. Everybody’s already drinking.
One Eye nods to the right, to an efficient-looking lady with a strong stride approaching their table, clipboard against her chest like armor. The handler. Can spot a handler a mile away, just as easily as she identified them. She introduces herself as Arlene. “I hope you had an easy trip out here,” she says, smiling.
Nods all around. Tiny belches. J. thinks she is smiling at him more than the others. “I left some brochures with the press packets at the hotel,” she says. “You should see what the county has to offer. Maybe you could include a little about the New River in your articles.”
“Articles?” Tiny says under his breath.
“I saw them,” Dave says, ever the appeaser when it came to the game. “Sounds like there’s a lot of nice things in these parts.”
In these parts. One Eye and J. look at each other: Dave is shameless.
“You should check it out if you get a chance,” Arlene advises, retreating from the table. “Well, you enjoy yourselves tonight; tomorrow is a big day. I see you’ve already made yourselves at home. If you have any questions, or if you’d like to talk to the mayor or one of the event planners, feel free to grab me at any time.” She departs, but not before smiling at J. again. Why was she smiling like that. Some kind of overcompensation for slavery or what? He leaves his seat to nab some salad, passing Lawrence on the way, who raises two fingers in greeting without breaking eye contact with the fellow he is talking to. The man is a pro.
It is a cafeteria salad, a Vegas all-you-can-eat salad, but J. doesn’t mind. He has a good feeling about the main course. He swipes a brown wooden bowl and tries to ration himself, judging the length of the buffet versus the capacity of the bowl (always this necessary consideration of cubic space), he catches a glimpse of celery up ahead and makes a note to save precious room.
“Haven’t these people ever heard of arugula?” Frenchie complains when he returns, looking a bit reticently at the fixings.
“Iceberg lettuce contains many important minerals,” J. says.
The conversation in the room cuts out and at the podium Arlene asks for everyone’s attention. She introduces Mayor Cliff and relinquishes the mike to a tall man with jagged gray hair and wolverine eyebrows. The skin of his face rough and sunken, eroded. Descended from railroad people, J. decides, he has timetable worry and collision fret in his genes. None of the other junketeers pay Cliff any mind; Dave is in the middle of an elaborate joke about a one-armed hooker.
The mayor says, “I’m glad you all came out here tonight to celebrate what our two towns have achieved in the past and what we will accomplish with this weekend.” Feedback curses the air and a chubby teenager scrambles to minister to the p.a. system. When the screech ends, Cliff thanks him and continues. “We’ve all been working hard these last few weeks and months, and I know I’m not the only one who’s glad that the day is finally here. My wife is very happy, I can tell you that. Charlotte—will you stand up? See that big grin on her face? That means no more 3 A.M. phone calls from Angel about her latest flower brainstorm. No more waking up to find Martin asleep on our doorstep with a report on the latest disaster.” A good part of the room chuckles in recognition. J. sighs. “Now it’s all paid off. So drink up, get some food and enjoy yourselves—you’ve earned it!”
Cliff takes a sip of water. “Some of you may have already heard that Ben Vereen will not be joining us tonight. I talked to his manager on the phone a few hours ago and he explained that while Mr. Vereen was very excited about coming down to Talcott, he was suffering from laryngitis and couldn’t possibly perform.” J. nibbles on a carrot and shakes his head. Laryngitis—probably resting after the vigorous and well-deserved ass-kicking he delivered upon his patently insane manager. “While this is a great blow—Mr. Vereen is an amazing performer loved the world over—we’ve arranged for some homegrown talent to appear after dinner. I won’t reveal his identity right now, but I know that some of you have heard him before and know he will not disappoint.” J. decides to tune him out. He doesn’t need to listen to this homespun rubbish; he has all weekend to gather material, what little he needs. Will he have to do actual research? Who is he kidding. But he could always use a quote or two to round things out. Nine hundred to twelve hundred words—the website editor said they hadn’t determined the average attention span of a web surfer, so they might trim his article if the next round of market research dictated. Twelve hundred words—he can excrete that modest sum in two hours no sweat, but a nice quote would spice it up. There is no need to listen tonight; he has two more days to badger some unsuspecting festival-goer into a colorful quote.
Cliff departed; in his stead ambles up some guy from the Post Office. Maybe ask that sister from the van her thoughts. She has something to say, J. figures. He sees her at the next table, listening to the Post Office guy, surrounded by the natives. Just as he is. J. looks around the room and confirms that they are the only black people in the joint. Honoring a black hero and them the only folks in the room. John Henry the American. He finishes off the last of the salad and looks over to see what is going on in the food area and he sees the red light.
He sees the red light and understands.
The red light at the head of a buffet table signifies one thing and one thing only: prime rib. J. has been waiting for this confirmation all day. In the airport he had glimpsed it in a vision and now it has come to pass. He sees himself cutting into the soft red meat, slicing first through the milky rind of fat, then gaining the meat and watching the blood extrude through dead pores at the loving, sedulous pressure of his cutting. J. sees the red light of the heating lamp at the far shore of the buffet table and immediately conjures mashed potatoes softening in essence of beef, the blood tinting the fluffy potato pink and refining it even purer, softer. This vision is the sublime distillation of all the buffets he’s known, the one and true spirit summoned by caterly prayer. He waits for them to wheel out dinner, he waits to be fulfilled.
What makes him tick, this collector of (#ulink_b1b90dce-ef53-58bb-ab7c-edaeec18803a) stamps? He doesn’t know himself. Alphonse Miggs sits in the Social Room of the Millhouse Inn, he sits on his hands at a table of eight, with seven folks he doesn’t know. At the start of the evening his knuckles brushed against a lump in his jacket pocket. He withdrew a mothball and, supremely embarrassed, thrust it back where it came. He wasn’t sure if anyone noticed his mark of shame. For the rest of the night he feels cursed with invisible pockets and all at the dinner can see his shame, the great pearl of naphthalene clinging to his person, smell the fumes of social incompetence emanating from it. Scoring their nostrils. The woman next to him, are her nostrils curling as she addresses him, is she sniffing him? She is about fifty years old, with a jubilant round face and well-pruned hedge of red hair. Noticing that he does not speak, noticing that he is one of two visitors from out of town at their table and not the black one, she introduces herself as the owner of the flower shop in Hinton. Her name is Angel and she smiles at Alphonse, exposing lips swabbed by red lipstick. Her accent elasticizes her words, jaw-jutting, sweet-sounding. She gestures at the glad ring of rainbow flowers around the podium, the looping green garlands dipping along the walls, and informs him that she spent hours devising pleasant arrangements for this weekend. Is she sniffing him? He nods at the vase in the center of the table, at the halfhearted burst of drooping tulips. He says they are very elegant. She thanks him and introduces him to her husband, a skinny man with a sun-cragged face who smiles a greeting at him before turning back to his conversation with the man next to him. She is in charge of all the floral arrangements, Angel explains, from tonight’s dinner to Saturday’s afternoon steeldriving exhibition and dinner, even the grand finale on Sunday, the stamp ceremony in town. As she recounts the preparations for each event her face seems to recapitulate the satellite emotions of each endeavor, the daisy hassle of Saturday’s lunch, the gladiolus hell of the steeldriving match. It is the biggest job she has ever done, her distributor downright apoplectic at the size of her shipment, the shifting orders and delivery dates. She has never commanded so many flowers before, it is a science, she could write a book about it, she jokes, but it all turned out fine in the end as anyone could plainly see and she got the name of her flower shop in the program. Which is good publicity. And where is Mr. Miggs from?
The drive from Silver Spring had been pleasant. It didn’t matter where you lived, Alphonse believed, you go five minutes in any direction from your house and become a stranger in your own neighborhood. Windows, drapes, doorsteps, doors, each one harboring a stranger and not a neighbor, one of the great number that make up the rest of the world. All it takes is five minutes in any direction to find yourself in the nation. Drive six hours and what do you find?
In the Talcott Motor Lodge Alphonse had undressed, folding his driving clothes neatly and separately on the bedspread. Driving clothes, as if he were tooling around in a reconditioned Model T, white scarf trailing from his neck, but Alphonse Miggs has names and categories for his world, subsets and sub-subsets. The inventory eases navigation through the breakwater of his days. He then removed his black suit from the garment bag and hooked it on the bathroom door to let the steam soothe wrinkles. Stepping into the shower, he felt cleanser residue scrape his feet. He ran a fingernail along the surface of the tub, across the pattern of raised traction grooves arrayed in a flower pattern, and contemplated the white dust there. The packaged soap had no scent and did not foam. He used up the whole bar searching for lather.
He was the first to arrive. In general Alphonse prefers to be early; he sympathizes with movie mobsters who have run afoul of the organization and arrive at key meetings in public locations before the appointed time to test the vibe, but in this case he had merely misremembered the start of dinner. He was an hour early. Alphonse entered the Social Room and took a few awkward steps inside. No one paid him any mind. A blond woman steered her clipboard around the room, directing the staff by remote control, tapping her pen. Two bartenders with black bow ties arranged liquor bottles on their stand, swiveling the labels forward and crunching beer bottles into buckets of ice. Alphonse picked out a table that was neither too close to the podium nor too close to the wall. He wanted to fade, but he also wanted to see the proceedings. He sat in one chair, tried on the angle, and moved two chairs over. Baleful wail from the microphones. Everyone winced and stared at the teenager monkeying with the amp, the boy’s hands skittered over knobs to tame the shriek. Silence then for a moment and the people returned to their tasks. Occasionally Alphonse caught the eye of one of them and they looked away quickly; it wasn’t their job to figure out why he was sitting there so early. A teenage girl attacked his table, straightening the napkins and silverware, tickling the flowers into a pert attention. She skipped Alphonse’s placement. He looked up at her and strained a smile from his face. She moved on to the next table. Alphonse turned his attention to the garden outside the French doors. Everything green and lush and orderly out there, darker greens coming to the fore, shadows brooding under leaves as a nearby mountain somewhere ate the sun.
A large man with a chef’s hat rolled out serving tables through the kitchen door.
His philately newsletter announced the John Henry stamp that spring, reprinting word for word the USPS’s release. A 113 million run in panes of twenty. Used to be commemorative stamps were something special, their limited runs hypothesizing scarcity down the line, bloating value. But there were so many now, issued so frequently that their significance dwindled. Alphonse Miggs collected railroad stamps.
He watched the people arrive. The preparations trickled to last-minute adjustments, an errand of tonic water, discipline of curtains and the other guests arrived. Five men in light summer-weight suits appeared at the door and the woman with the clipboard descended on them, introducing herself and gesticulating. The men looked city. Alphonse figured they were agents from the glorious USPS. They took measure of the room, looked down at the terra-cotta tile on the floor, the light blue trim of the moldings. The woman gestured at the tables, at the bar: sit anywhere you like, help yourself to the refreshments. The postal men chose a table up front. One man took his jacket off and draped it over the seatback, but seeing that his comrades did not join him, replaced his jacket on his shoulders. They proceeded to the bar one by one for seltzer water and a slice of lemon.
Natives of Talcott in exuberant summer clothes sallied forth, exchanging greetings for the second or third time that day. Alphonse watched the clipboard woman wave hello to them. They all knew each other. Perhaps he’d spoken to this woman on the phone, Arlene. The John Henry announcement drew him in and he called for more information, although he couldn’t possibly think what more he could have needed; the press release had been quite thorough. The USPS under Runyon was very receptive to the public, maintained a line to answer questions, keep the dialogue open. The man who answered his call, after a not overlong and entirely decent wait on hold, informed him that if the gentleman was that interested in the Folk Heroes series, he might want to visit the town of Talcott, West Virginia, for their festival. He gave Alphonse a contact number and asked if he could help him with anything else. Civil servants get a bad rap, Alphonse thought. He called Arlene at the Visitors Center and she was delighted at his interest, the flowing signature scribbled on the business card enclosed with the information packet described a conscientious and caring nature. He made reservations.
Some later arrivals had no choice but to sit with the man. Guests staked claims for their parties, planting flags of purses and jackets, saving seats, savoring or ruing their place in the pecking order, made the best of things. Two couples sat down at Alphonse’s table on the other side of the globe, as far from him as the rim would allow. One of the men nodded at Alphonse, and, not waiting for a response, looked into his lap as he slowly unfolded his napkin. Alphonse wondered if the table would fill up or if he’d remain out there on the ice cap. He made minute adjustments to the placement of his knife and fork. Contemplation of tines. Another local couple sat down between him and the other people, they greeted their friends, closing up the circle except for the seat to Alphonse’s right. Alphonse sat on his hands.
An excited breeze teased the napes of all in the room: the salad table was open for business. The vanguard left their seats, heads darted toward, seats emptied in twos and threes. Alphonse hustled up to beat the queue. He garnered a fine spot in the top third and they heaved forward, reading and deciphering the feet before them. A shoulder dipped and this was taken for a sign. So tight together they must smell him. Were those beets he saw, that burgundy jelly ahead? Alphonse glimpsed a man at the podium looking over his papers. The man whispered into the microphone, hello, hello. The line bristled. They were going to miss the introduction, trapped by mixed greens on the other side of the room. The man walked away from the podium, merely testing sound, but the line hurried anyway. Iceberg lettuce, shavings of carrot, chickpeas, and a nice portion of beets.
When he returned to his table, the final empty seat had been filled by a young black woman, alone. He realized he hadn’t seen a lot of black people so far, and since the others at the table did not acknowledge her, he assumed she was a visitor like him. She looked down at his bowl and walked to the salad bar. He had dolloped too much blue cheese dressing. Black people are African Americans now. Alphonse recalled again, he pondered the fact repeatedly, that the first commemorative stamp in the world had also been a railroad stamp, issued by Peru in 1871 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the South American railroad. (It is a sign.) And now John Henry, a railroad hero up there with Casey Jones, was getting his due in a commemorative stamp. Alphonse thought about the bustle of the room and the itinerary of the next few days. What he had come there to do. The woman on his left introduced herself as the owner of a flower shop. He listens and sits on his hands.
The table behind Alphonse is rambunctious and distracting. He turns around and sees five men, obviously not from Talcott: their revels are hermetic, and have nothing to do with what is going on in the room, the occasion. They drink heavily; one of their number, a gaudily dressed man with an eyepatch, returns from the bar pinching glasses together with professional poise, bearing refills for him and his friends before they have drained the drinks already in front of them. Angel tilts her head and clucks. The black woman on his right catches Alphonse’s eyes and says they are a bunch of loud journalists from New York City. She says her name is Pamela.
Before they can speak further, the woman with the clipboard taps on the microphone for attention, her lacquered fingernails clawing at the air. Salad forks are set aside. She introduces herself as Arlene from the Visitors Center, and thanks everyone in the room for attending. Alphonse feels like an impostor, of course. He has been invited to this function, but most of the people in the room are locals, have worked directly on planning the weekend. His purpose swiftly comforts him. He is undercover. The mayor of Talcott replaces Arlene at the microphone and makes a few remarks. The other people at Alphonse’s table laugh at an inside joke, a nugget of Talcott lore. Mayor Cliff is tall and gaunt. Thick gray curly hair writhes on his head, soft against the sharp ridges of his cheekbones. Alphonse isn’t listening. Tonight is the warm-up, he thinks. Tomorrow the tourists and the rest of the town, the others beside the town luminaries getting fed in the Social Room. Tomorrow the celebration is open to the public, John Henry activities and John Henry barbecues, Sunday’s trumpets-and-drums unveiling and the official release of the panes to the public on Monday. Bigger and bigger stages for the stamp. He will take his place and respond to his cue. Alphonse’s local post office had recently outfitted the teller windows with bulletproof glass.
Alphonse sits up at the mention of the man from the Post Office, Parker Smith. He watches the man leave his comrades at the Post Office table (Alphonse’s assessment had been correct) and shake hands with the mayor. Two perfect squares of gray perch in his black hair above his ears, almost the size of stamps, which amuses Alphonse slightly. Smith smiles and the emissary from the government addresses the people. “On behalf of Marvin Runyon, Postmaster General, and all of us at the United States Postal Service,” he says, teeth twinkling, “I’d like to thank the good people of Talcott and Hinton for inviting us down for this wonderful occasion. I know you must be hungry and eager for the great food and musical entertainment the good people at the Chamber of Commerce have lined up for y’all, so I’ll be brief. Did I say y’all? I’m sorry, I meant to say you all. Must be my Southern roots acting up. Haven’t had so much Southern hospitality since I was a youngster visiting my grandparents in North Carolina.”
Like a pro he waits for the chuckles to subside. People are so vain, Alphonse thinks. He watches Smith’s face twitch into earnestness. “I was talking about this with some of my colleagues just a bit earlier—how you can’t help but get caught up in the great history of this region. Talcott was instrumental in a great moment of our nation’s growth—the forging of a national railroad, an effort unrivaled in human history. It was not without cost, as I’m sure you good people know only too well. How many of the folks who take Amtrak, or receive products shipped by CXS Transportation on the very railroad tracks just a few miles away, take the time to think about the good people of Talcott and Hinton whose grandparents and great-grandparents toiled under adverse conditions to bring this country together?” He takes faces in the crowd one by one with his eyes. “How often does one of those passengers on the train think about all the blood and sweat that made their journey possible? Part of what we at the Post Office hope to achieve by our issue of the Folk Heroes commemorative is to create awareness of the trials of men like John Henry, to invite Americans to walk in his shoes. That each time they use one of our Folk Heroes stamps, they think about the men who died to get us where we are today.”
Is this man talking about a stamp or taking the beach at Normandy? Smith rallies for his final push: “But you all here today know much more about the sacrifices of railroad workers than I do,” humble now, “it’s your history. You don’t need to hear me go on about it—your families have lived it. I just hope that this stamp, and the celebrations this weekend, can help tell the story of the sacrifices of men. John Henry was an Afro-American, born into slavery and freed by Mr. Lincoln’s famous proclamation. But more importantly, he was an American. He helped build this nation into what it is today, and his great competition with the steam drill is a testament to the strength of the human spirit. The USPS is proud to honor such an American. Thank you.”
A few minutes later, Alphonse finds himself in the food line next to Pamela. They stand next to each other and do not speak and both know a little bit of token conversation is appropriate. They are seated at the same table and the night is already half over. But perhaps he is past the minuet of social graces. Alphonse decides to play his part, however—they can sift in vain through the clues later—and asks the woman what brought her to Talcott. Her face stiffens a bit and she says that her father collected John Henry memorabilia. That’s interesting, Alphonse offers, because he is a collector as well, a collector of railroad stamps. Then her expression. He has seen the expression on her face before. It is the uncomprehending, loose shape faces adopt when he tells people he collects stamps. He informs her of the coincidence of the first commemorative being a railroad stamp, and here they are today. She looks puzzled and grabs a plate. The fumes of naphthalene swirl around him.
The old joke: what did the young lady say to her stamp-collecting suitor?
Philately will get you nowhere.
Pamela and Alphonse forage from the heated trays and do not speak again until the end of the night, after the commotion at the journalists’ table has come to an end.
Applause, hands sliding toward slanted forks, as (#ulink_30f0d5ab-c0a4-5907-b25d-a439150730b3) the Post Office man leaves the podium and Arlene announces that dinner will be ready presently. Not presently enough for J. He looks up at the thin, meek man with the polka-dot bow tie standing over their table. A press laminate hangs around his neck, abject and ridiculous. J. feels embarrassed for him; wearing a press laminate is so gauche. After waiting in vain for Frenchie to finish his story or for one of them to acknowledge his presence, the man finally clears his throat and says, “Arlene said you were some writers from New York City.”
“That’s right,” Tiny says, “We thought we’d git ourselves down yonder for this shindig.”
“My name is Broderick Honnicut,” he declares, tapping the press laminate. “I’m a staff writer for the Hinton Owl. Thought I’d come over and say hello.”
“Staff writer for the Hinton Owl,” Frenchie considers, raising his eyebrows at his colleagues. “Well, well. I think I’ve seen your byline.”
“You broke the story on the chicken rustling ring, I do believe,” Tiny says.
“Chicken rustling …?”Honnicut utters.
“The chicken-choking scandal,” Tiny corrects himself.
“Turned out the cover-up went to the highest levels of government,” Frenchie breaks in, taking the baton. “The town barber was implicated, according to a high-level source.”
“The alderman got caught with his hand in the cookie jar,” Tiny says.
No need to mess with this guy, J. thinks. He just came over to be friendly and he gets this. It is going to be a long night if the boys are this cantankerous early on. He twists in his seat to ponder the red light.
“Allegedly, Tiny,” Dave admonishes, “always remember allegedly.” He turns to Honnicut, smiling. J. knows he is about to set the guy up. “They’re just joking with you. Say, tell me: What’s the Hinton Owl’s motto?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Honnicut says, growing flustered.
“You know what I’m talking about,” Dave explains. “Every paper has a motto. The New York Times has ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print,’ every great newspaper has to have a motto. Beneath your logo, there’s a motto, right? What does it say?”
“It says,” Honnicut stumbles, “it says, ‘A Hoot and a Holler: The Hinton Owl Sees All.’”
Dave smiles. “That’s catchy.”
“‘A hoot and a snoot will keep you up all night,’” Frenchie says, and J. lights out for the food table. Because the red light is calling him. At the terminus of the buffet lies the sacred preserve of the Happy Hunting Grounds. Set above the cutting plate like a divine illumination, the red heating lamps warm the sweet meat. The red light is a beacon to the lost wayfarer, it is a tavern lamp after hours of wilderness black. J. experiences an involuntary physical response to the red light and begins to salivate. Sometimes he feels this in movie theaters, salivating at the glimpse of the red Exit sign. What a warm world it would be, he ponders, if we all slept under a red light at night.
When he returns, plate tottering, a sodden Babel of flavor, J. notes that Honnicut has departed. J. is grateful—he couldn’t take much more of that. He looks around for One Eye, but can’t see him anywhere, not even in the food line. No matter. J. has important business. The potatoes have declined his invitation, but J. still savors the pliable tang of overcooked heads of broccoli, carrots in star shapes, decobbed corn in pearly water. And the prime rib, the prime rib, aloft in its own juice, mottled with tiny globules of luscious melted fat. He showers the meat with salt, as if there could be anything greater in the universe than beef drenched heartily with salt. He possesses teeth sharpened by evolution for the gnashing of meat, a digestive system engineered for the disintegration of meat, and he means to utilize the gifts of nature to their fullest expression.
“This may be the New South, but they haven’t caught up to everything, thank God,” Tiny says. “This ain’t no vegetarian menu.”
“Amen to that,” J. says.
“Ben Vereen was coming here?” Frenchie asks, incredulous. His plate is immured by empty glasses, mutilated limes groaning at their bottoms.
“It’s a living,” J. says. He gobbles prime rib and winces with pleasure, fighting telltale paroxysm. He needs the meat to pile on the liquor.
“How are they going to pay for all this?”
“Emptying the town coffers.”
“No new basketball uniforms for the high school varsity team.”
“Not the basketball uniforms!”
“Any of you actually writing this thing up?” Tiny asks, a yellow liquid glistening in his beard. He has filled twin plates with buffet mounds of horrific symmetry.
“I’m doing it for this travel site Time Warner is putting up on the web,” J. informs him.
“Those guys are just throwing money away,” Frenchie opined. “Fine with me.”
“I got some outfit called West Virginia Life on the hook,” Dave begins, “a monthly job they put out down here. But before I placed it I had been thinking about making it a New South piece. No one thinks about West Virginia. Throw in a few lines about the national parks and the white rafting stuff they got around here. It would have been a nice change of pace to do a trend thing after all these movie things I’ve been doing.”
“Seems like a good peg,” Frenchie says. “Though if I were writing it up, I could see focusing on the industrial age–information age angle. John Henry’s man-against-machineness. That’s still current, people can empathize with his struggle and get into it and all that shit.”
“So you’re going with Bob is Hip?” Tiny demands of Dave, his voice rising.
“Why not?”
“Are you sure it’s not Bob’s Alive!?” Tiny hisses.
It is an old argument. Freddie “the Bull” McGinty, before his unfortunate heart attack, had identified three elemental varieties of puff pieces, and over time the freelancer community had accepted his Anatomy of Puff. An early junketeer, the Bull (so named for his huge and cavernous nostrils) observed the nature of the List over time and posited that while all puff is tied by a golden cord to a subject, be it animal, vegetable or mineral, the pop expression of that subject can be reduced to three discrete schools of puff. For the sake of clarity, the Bull christened the archetypal subject Bob, and named the three essential manifestations of Bob as follows: Bob’s Debut, Bob Returns, and Bob’s Comeback. Each manifestation commanded its own distinct stock phrases and hyperbolic rhetoric.
Bob’s Debut is obvious. Like lightning, Bob, the talented newcomer or long-struggling obscure artist, scorches the earth, his emergence charged by the profound electromagnetics of pre-Debut publicity and sometimes genuine merit. Such a glorious Debut deserves to be heralded in the glossy chambers of media. The out-of-nowhere record by the young lad from Leeds, the searching and surprisingly articulate second-person voice of the crab fisherman’s roman à clef, the visionary directorial outing channeling the zeitgeist—all these works can be attributed to Bob, and Bob’s Debut is a reliable story, the struggling talent is recognized, the indomitable vision championed. It makes good copy. This is the first manifestation of Bob.
Then comes Bob’s Return. His sophomore record, aimless electronic noodling in some cuts, fame has gone to his head, but still listenable; the second novel, recapitulating some of the first’s themes, somehow lacking, emboldened by success he tries to tackle too much; guaranteed by contract final-cut approval, the director esteems his instincts out of proportion, the special effects intrude and he can’t trim it down to under two and a half hours. Bob’s Return is well chronicled, he is a known quantity naturally pitched to editors, but not without hazards. He may have fallen out of favor among his initial champions and the long lead times of monthlies make cover stories a risky proposition. No editor wants to look at the cover of their magazine and see that they’ve showcased the profile of a celeb whose return had flopped miserably the week before. Editors guess, sniff the culture, and commit to Bob’s Return, fingers crossed that the opening weekend box office will not be cursed, that the goddamned critics have not panned Bob’s Return vehicle irredeemably to the mephitic baths of perdition. Weeklies and Sunday sections of major dailies have a leg up on the monthlies; if something magical happens, they can hitch a ride. This is the second manifestation of Bob.
Bob’s Comeback is miraculous. It can occur two years after the doomed or mediocre Return, or twenty years. Many things could have happened in the intervening time to make Bob’s Comeback printworthy: five crafty but overlooked novels consigned him to the twilight of midlist; three big-budget flops, two straight to video movies, one sitcom and a couple softcore thrillers fit only for the dingier cable outlets made a character actor of Bob; five very strange albums anointed Bob a critics’ darling but a radio pariah. The long unchecked skid into obscurity. But then the comeback. Something shifts in pop. It helps if they have overcome a drug problem. Test screenings positive, publishing industry buzz a-flowing, advance radio airplay of the first single augurs good things. The publicity blows fire out of the cave, scaring the townsfolk, scaly thighs scraping in preparation for a rampage through the village. All the bad things the critics said are forgotten, the industry insiders rally around Bob, the author of the where-are-they-now? article is tendered his kill fee. Bob’s Comeback makes covers. Equipped with a new look, a new agent, a new deal, Bob is back on top. Everybody loves an underdog, a redemption story. This is the third manifestation of Bob.
The Bull’s musings were well received by his freelancing brethren. It brought order to their lives. Spat upon by editors, insulted by neophyte publicity minions, the junketeers embraced the woeful clarity of the trinity. By the time J. made the List, another variety had been identified and sanctioned by the junketeers. The trend piece. The phenomenon of the trend piece was brought to the table by a British music writer named Nigel Buttons, who had journeyed into the lounges and clubs of London, cozied up to DJs and promoters of tiny establishments situated at the bottoms of stairwells accessible only by alley, the garrets of demimonde, and decided that the three traditional categories could be expanded to include a new one: Bob Is Hip. By the addition of Bob Is Hip, Bob’s other manifestations could be infused with new life by situating Bob in a scene or cultural eddy. Say Bob is a ukulele-playing gent who wears sunglasses on stage. If the evidence warrants, and even if it doesn’t, Bob the ukulele-playing sunglasses-wearing gent can be insinuated within a burgeoning scene of ukulele-playing sunglasses-wearers—they have a culture and slang, they all sleep together, the romantic entanglements internecine. It is an exotic subculture that begs further exploration. Bob, blessed by a multirecord or multibook or multipicture deal, spotted by well-paid talent scouts with special acumen, takes an early lead on his cohorts and is now the glorious exponent of an underground movement. Depending on the circumstances, his Hip Debut promises a spectacular earthshaking realignment of pop; he finds his true voice in his Hip Return; the maundering and general getting-his-shit-together years of his decline are justified by the Hipness of his Comeback. The Bob Is Hip variation met with some initial protest until its endorsers suggested that creating novel catch phrases from “the new” or “post-” or devising witty neologisms for the nascent movement could ensure one’s fame. A subculture is an amino acid soup out of which book deals crawl. More important, Bob Is Hip has broad applications. A manufacturer of blue jeans bruits its new tapered leg line. A junketeer attends and feasts at the event, but has no real peg to pitch the story. Armed with “The Neo Taper” and a broad manifesto, the blue jeans are a bona fide trend, no matter how short-lived, no matter how isolated. Presently, Bob Is Hip was a viable form of puff. Some junketeers jockeyed to grab credit for creating the quintessential Bob Is Hip piece, flailing their clippings in the air, neologisms underlined and backed up by concrete examples of their passage into conventional usage, but there were many contenders and the issue was never settled. Bob’s manifestations had become four.
Tiny started the argument in the Social Room because of a recent disturbance among the junketeers. Since the days of Gutenberg, an ambient hype wafted the world, throbbing and palpitating. From time to time, some of that material cooled, forming bodies of dense publicity. Recently this phenomenon occurred more frequently. Everyone felt this change, it was tactile and insistent. They found themselves in abstract rooms at events of no obvious purpose. Certainly there was a person/artifact/idea on display being promoted, but there was no peg, no impending release that it could be traced to. Without a peg, the subjects in question were hard to sell to the editors of newspapers and magazines. And yet the articles ran, the expenses were reimbursed, payroll cut the checks. The public liked them. Updates on well-known public entities who were doing nothing at all, a computer marvel far from implementation, musicians in coffee shops years from demos. The undiscovered hired flacks before they needed them; the established but quiescent or loafing celeb retained publicity apparatus to remind the people of their mere presence. Hence the new, hotly debated variety called Bob’s Alive! or Simply Bob. The golden cord had been severed and puff pieces roamed the newsstands, unmoored to any release date. Simply Bob. Gossip columnists had engaged in Simply Bob activities for years, some argued. A sighting at a club or restaurant, walking the shar-pei on Fifth Avenue, cruising a downtown haberdashery: these engagements were memorialized by bold type in the daily gossip columns. With junketeers munching and noshing at the tables of nonevent more frequently these days, and finding their reportage published, some sort of addition to the now-ossified varieties of Bob seemed imminent.
J. doesn’t have an opinion either way. While accustomed to thinking of four varieties of Bob, his work will not change if Bob’s Alive! is ratified and passed by the body of junketeers. He will weather the rough seas of the polemic. Puff is puff; it is puff. Observing the debate from the sidelines, he will wait for the smoke to clear, and continue to perform his function as he has for many years now. J. saws off a corner of prime rib and sticks it in his mouth. One piece left. He decides to finish off the limp broccoli and save the final bit of beef for the end.
Tiny rails against Bob’s Alive! “I was against Bob Is Hip, too,” he reminds them with a snarl. “I never thought we should have gone that way. It’s too diffuse—this is a prime example.”
“I remember your whining,” Frenchie recalls.
“And now you want to go and bring in this Bob’s Alive! thing. Is Talcott Alive?”
“I said New South,” Dave corrects. “That’s a trend piece. I can bring in improved race relations. It’s Bob’s Hip. Talcott is hip, they have a black hero. I can bring in Atlanta. I can bring in lots of stuff. Houston—Houston is hot now, it’s attracting a lot of diversity.”
“I’d go for Debut personally,” Frenchie says.
“Debut?” Dave asks. “John Henry has been around for years, this town is a physical thing that has a history. I don’t personally care to know what that history is, but it surely exists. I think trend is perfectly appropriate.”
“See what I’m talking about?” Tiny thunders, spraying droplets of a substance from his beard like a dog shaking off rain. “You could make a case for Talcott as Debut, Comeback or Return or Hip. It’s all jumbled up now. I’m accustomed to four varieties of puff and I like it like that. Four elements, four humors, four seasons, four varieties of puff. Otherwise why have categories at all? Why not make everything a category. A puff for every little thing.”
“We already have that,” One Eye interjects. “We call them magazines.” One Eye has been quiet all night, and after his comment he looks back down at his food and prods corn. J. asks him if anything is wrong.
“Just thinking is all,” One Eye says.
“Thinking about your secret mission?”
“What?”
“You said in the van. A mission that could change the course of human events.”
One Eye’s one eye narrows. He had forgotten he mentioned it. Dave, Tiny and Frenchie continue their argument. One Eye leans over to J. and whispers, “I’m taking my name off the List. Permanently.”
“You renounce Satan and all his works? How do you intend to do that?”
“I have been plotting and planning, my friend, plotting and planning.” His face illegible. “I’ve had this event circled in my filofax for some time now.”
Before he can question One Eye further, J. sees Arlene go up to the podium. The musical entertainment. The red light beckons. Deciding he better get seconds on the prime rib before they close the food down, he throws his napkin on the seat and hustles. No hick is going to gyp him of his bounty. He removes himself and scurries over to the red light. One Eye looks disappointed, but J. figures he can pick up the conversation later. Arlene describes the singing prowess of one of the sons of Talcott, a boy who will go on to great things. This time J. doesn’t take any vegetables. He asks for five proud slabs of prime rib. A young man departs one of the tables near the podium, a burly teenager with a soft balloon face. His baby fat has never gone away; it has chased the teenager’s growth inch for inch, keeping in step, swelling proportionally. At the boy’s table are an older man and woman—his mother and father, J. gathers. He hadn’t noticed them before. That makes five black folks in the room. Who says integration can’t work, he asks himself.
J. returns to the table, plate before him, the raja’s rubies on a velvet bed. Dave and the others are watching the boy get himself together at the podium. He wears a black church suit and a brazen red tie clenched by a clumsy fat knot. His eyes and mouth, tiny things, disappear into his soft face like the buttons of a plush couch. The boy looks a little nervous, but then he starts to sing, and from the depths of him rouses a gorgeous baritone—it reels from the amplifiers like a flock of dazzling birds. The boy sings the “Ballad of John Henry.” The boy sings,
John Henry was just a baby,
When he fell on his mammy’s knee;
He picked up a hammer and a little piece of steel, Said,
“This hammer will be the death of me, Lord, Lord,
This hammer will be the death of me.”
John Henry was a very small boy
Sitting on his father’s knee,
Said, “The Big Bend Tunnel on the C&O road
Is gonna be the death of me, Lord, Lord,
Is gonna be the death of me.”
John Henry went upon a mountain
And came down on the side;
The mountain was so tall, John Henry was so small,
That he laid down his hammer and he cried, “Lord, Lord,”
That he laid down his hammer and he cried.
The rude talk that pestered the earlier speakers disperses. Lord, Lord: He hacks at primal truth and splinters off words and the men and women ache. Enraptured, all of them, openmouthed in beatitude and slack in delight at the nimble phrasings of the boy. Except for J. J. attacks the prime rib. He has not had his fill. He cuts off a piece ringed by a crust of blackened fat and sticks it in his mouth. It is a big piece, a hearty plug of meat, he doesn’t know what time he’ll eat tomorrow and he needs the meat. He rends tendrils of meat with his teeth, repositions them with his tongue, rends them further. He swallows quickly, another piece already impaled on his merciless tines, and the plug catches in his throat. He can’t breathe.
The boy sings,
John Henry told his captain,
“Captain go to town
And bring me back two twenty-pound hammers,
And I’ll sure beat your steam drill down. Lord, Lord,
And I’ll sure beat your steam drill down.”
John Henry told his people,
“You know that I’m a man.
I can beat all the traps that have ever been made,
Or I’ll die with my hammer in my hand, Lord, Lord,
Or I’ll die with my hammer in my hand.”
The steam drill set on the right-hand side,
John Henry was on the left.
He said, “I will beat that steam drill down
Or hammer my fool self to death, Lord, Lord,
Or hammer my fool self to death.”
It won’t go down. He tries to swallow again but the plug will not oblige him. It is a stern and vengeful plug of meat. He tries to swallow again, panic trebling. Surely he isn’t choking. It won’t go down. He’s going to die on a junket? This is some far-out shit, this is a fucking ironic way to go. Is he using ironic incorrectly? The copy editors are going to kill him. They are really cracking down on the misuse of the word ironic, it’s like this global cabal of comma checkers and run-on sentences and fragments. Roaring in his ears. Why won’t it go down? He finds it inconceivable that no one knows what is going on with him. They are looking at the boy and listening to his words. He has a problem asking for help. He does not want to look weak. And it might not be an emergency. Surely it will pass. The meat is just fucking with him. He could jump up, slam the table, knock over their free drinks, that would get their attention. But he’s sitting there choking, quietly choking. Is this his pattern? That sounds like a diagnosis. And if he can self-diagnose, he can self-medicate. He has practice in that area. But you can’t do that when your throat is stopped. Seduced by a red illumination. Bang, whimper, what the fuck.
The boy sings,
John Henry dropped the ten-pound hammer,
And picked up the twenty-pound sledge;
Every time his hammer went down,
You could see that steel going through, Lord, Lord,
You could see that steel going through.
John Henry was just getting started,
Steam drill was half way down;
John Henry said, “You’re ahead right now,
But I’ll beat you on the last go-around, Lord, Lord,
I’ll beat you on the last go-around.”
What’s this guy singing? He’s choking on the stubborn plug of meat. John Henry, John Henry. He works on the C&O Railroad. He pushes puff, he is going for the record. His muscles must be jumping out of his skin. It won’t move, it sits like a bullet in his throat. No oxygen for me, thanks, I’ve had enough. Luke Cage the Marvel Comics superhero had bulletproof skin. At one point he had a sticker book where he kept stickers of Marvel Comics superheroes, they jumped out of the page, dynamic, Avengers Assemble and all that, muscles on full ripple, Luke Cage the jive-talking ex-con. This is what we get. Your whole life is supposed to flash before your eyes and this is what I get. Step into the light. Red light? What was up with that yellow shirt he wore anyway, some sleazy guy in a disco laying lines on the ladies, Luke Cage. He finds it incredible that in this crushing and collapsing time, he has the time to think these thoughts. But they say your life flashes before your eyes. I’m a sophisticated black man from New York City and I’m going to die down here. With cicadas, they got cicadas down here, don’t they. I want roaches, real crumb-eating fucks from out of the drain.
The boy sings,
John Henry told his shaker,
“Big boy, you better pray
For if I miss this six-foot steel,
To-morrow will be your burying day, Lord, Lord,
To-morrow will be your burying day.”
The men that made that steam drill
Thought it was mighty fine;
John Henry drove his fourteen feet,
While the steam drill only made nine, Lord, Lord,
While the steam drill only made nine.
John Henry went home to his good little woman,
Said, “Polly Ann, fix my bed,
I want to lay down and get some rest,
I’ve an awful roaring in my head, Lord, Lord,
I’ve an awful roaring in my head.”
Isn’t there something he is supposed to do? He feels like he is falling from a height. He can’t think of it. He can excrete twelve hundred words in two hours and yet he can’t think of any last words. How about an epitaph? He can’t get farther than his name and the pertinent bookend dates. He slaps the table to get their attention. Their drinks jump. He sees a restaurant sign, yellow and deep blue, on the wall of a restaurant, on the walls of infinite restaurants. Who wants to be the guy in the picture turning blue? Black folks turn blue? Look for the telltale signs. Pictographs. Certainly public service announcements, like road signs and airport signs, need a simple language. Simple message, simple expression. Is that a journalistic axiom? He can’t remember, and yet it sounds so official. Nobody notices his death. Sensation of falling. Who wants to be the blue guy in the choking picture on the wall of a cheap restaurant? Where is this place’s sign? There must be laws about the placement of the signs, eating establishments must post them in convenient places. Federal law, but then maybe they vary from state to state. States’ rights! States’ rights, these people love their states’ rights, signs on fountains, back of the bus, Rosa Parks. This place will fucking kill him. He should have known better. A black man has no business here, there’s too much rough shit, too much history gone down here. The Northern flight, right: we wanted to get the fuck out. That’s what they want, they want us dead. It’s like the song says.
The boy sings,
John Henry told his woman,
“Never wear black, wear blue.”
She said, “John, don’t never look back,
For, honey, I’ve been good to you, Lord, Lord,
For, honey, I’ve been good to you.”
John Henry was a steeldriving man,
He drove in many a crew;
He has now gone back to the head of the line
To drive the heading on through, Lord, Lord,
To drive the heading on through.
He stops falling. His body bursts and he is jerked up out of his seat. Involuntary Physical Response: the signs people keep on their lawns to repel burglars? He jumps out of his seat. My eyes must be popping out my head like some coon cartoon. His hands point to his throat. Can’t these people see what’s going on? The boy keeps singing. The pain is in his throat, around his throat and he would like them to make it stop. All these crackers looking up at me, looking up at the tree. Nobody doing nothing, just staring. They know how to watch a nigger die.
PART TWO MOTOR LODGE NOCTURNE (#ulink_8797f7bf-bb7a-53e0-b1e0-6f4b513924e6)
The first blow shattered half the bones (#ulink_8c9b5003-a387-5a11-a887-72273b80ee22) in the boy’s hand and the second shattered the other half. There was no way he could stop his hammer from coming down the second time. He was swinging his next blow before his first struck the bit. That night in the grading camp someone said that they could hear the boy’s scream all the way on top of the mountain and down in the shafts, louder than the sound of blasting. The boy’s hand was all chewed up. The doctor would have to cut it off. The shale dust settled into the blood and melted into it like too-early snow. The other driver dropped his sledge and his shaker told one of the water carriers to run for help. They had stopped singing. This was time out of the Captain’s timetable.
John Henry looked down at the boy. He had the build, but anyone could see he wasn’t a shaker. Too much of the rabbit in him. The boss had told him the boy was a shaker on the west end and had been reassigned to fill in for L’il Bob. L’il Bob had been coughing fiercely the last few days and needed a day of fresh air to clear out his chest. He kept a bucket by his cot for what he spat up. No one mentioned miner’s consumption, the black rot of the lungs caused by the foul air. Between the smoke from the lard and blackstrap candles, the rock dust and the blasting fumes it was a miracle they all weren’t sick after a year in a tunnel. There was still time. L’il Bob didn’t want to get caught coughing and lose his grip on the drill bit. It turned out the boy hadn’t been a shaker on the west end; he’d carried water, and only for a week. What you needed were steady hands and speed, but what you needed most of all was faith. The sledge came down and drove the drill bit into the rock and the shaker had to twist the bit between blows to loosen the dust in the hole and keep the bit level for the next blow. Two quick shakes and a twist made the rock dust fly out of the hole. You had to have steady hands and speed, but you had to have faith. You had to know that the driver wasn’t going to miss and smash your hands and ruin them. You had to hold it straight. John Henry and L’il Bob understood each other, which is why John Henry didn’t like breaking in a new shaker. You had to hold it straight or you’d never hold anything in that hand again. The boy did fine for half the day, but then John Henry could see him get lazy or lose attention or maybe he just realized how crazy the job was. The candlelight was dim and useless. The candles in their hats sometimes snuffed out suddenly, the Lord blew them out, and the hammer fell mightily in darkness. The shaker’s hands better be where they had to be when that happened. If the bit got dull, or the hole got too deep for a six-foot bit and they needed an eight-foot bit, the shaker had to replace it without letting the steeldriver miss a blow. The rhythm was all. L’il Bob did his work well. The boy did fine for a long time. But then he was slow, that one time, and the bit was not level. No question he would lose that hand.
He looked down at the boy. The boy sat on the ground, leaning against a powder can, looking at his hand and screaming to split his head open. The other driver, George, tended to him. He wrapped the rope around the boy’s wrist to stop the blood. John Henry looked down at them. They were blackened by dust and oily with sweat, yellow and brown in the candlelight. This was time out of Captain Johnson’s schedule. Every night Captain Johnson came with his tape to measure the day’s heading. He started at the west end of the tunnel, took a measurement, and came around the mountain to the eastern cut and took a measurement. He could have sent one of the bosses but he did it personally. Captain Johnson had a schedule of convergence, of a moment when the final blast would break the mountain in two. Each morning the bosses changed the wooden shingles on the sign outside the cut. It was how far they had come. John Henry told the boy to quiet his screaming. He was not the first he had maimed.
He looked at his hands, the big dumb mules at the end of his arms. They did what they wanted. Palms like territories. It was stupid. Time it took the runner to get outside the tunnel, the time it took for help to arrive was lost time. John Henry bent over and lifted the boy from the ground and threw him over his shoulder, made a sack of him. He walked east, faster than going west ever was. They made ten feet a day with twelve-hour shifts. It was always faster getting out of the mountain than going in. He walked on the planks. The planks heaved up dust from beneath them with each step. He kicked a blasting cap out of his way and it skittered into a pile of dull bits the runners had left to the side. The hole they drilled that day was eight feet deep; probably the next morning the blasting crew would nestle the nitroglycerine inside it and blow it open to a few feet of heading. He told the boy to be still or else he’d drop him right there and the boy whimpered and was still. He asked the boy where he was from. The boy mentioned a town in Virginia, not far from the Reynolds plantation where John Henry had been born. Then the boy started screaming and John Henry let him. They were a quarter of a mile inside the mountain and John Henry could feel the mountain heave over him, breathing. He looked up and saw the one ugly crag that always taunted him from the ceiling of the tunnel whenever he passed. He remembered the day the blasting exposed the crag of rock and John Henry saw it for the first time, sneering at him, a spiteful beak of shale laughing at their little work, laughing at him. He worked under the crag for four days and each minute it cursed him. He was glad when they finally drove the heading past it and hoped that a charge would obliterate it. But when they reentered the tunnel after the smoke slowed and all the weakened stone from the roof of the tunnel had ceased falling, the crag was still there, angry and unforgiving, and John Henry damned it each time he walked by. The crag knew him.
The mouth of the tunnel was like an eye opening as they got closer to it. He tasted the change in the air. The ground shifted under his feet and all around him. Blasting in the west end. Some small pieces of shale tumbled from the roof of the tunnel but nothing big. Not this time. John Henry felt the back of his shirt wetting with the boy’s blood. Yesterday a blast in the western cut shook out a large section of the arching in the east heading, and a stone from the cave-in crushed the skull of one of the drill runners, Paul. He’d never talked to Paul but John Henry knew he was from further south, Georgia. They buried him with the rest down the hill. No one knew if he had any family. He saw the light swimming in the gloom and as he stepped out of the tunnel he felt like Jonah stepping from Leviathan’s belly. He knew the mountain was going to get him but the Lord had decided it would not be this day.
The blacksmiths at the mouth put down the bits they were sharpening to look at John Henry and the boy. They stood with some pick-and-shovel men and skinners and they all gawked at them. He saw the water carrier who had gone to get help standing with the boss. The carrier was out of breath and pointed at them. The boss frowned and told John Henry to put the boy in one of the mule carts. John Henry laid him down in the cart next to an empty crate of nitroglycerine and saw the boy’s eyes. He had stopped screaming and yelping and he shivered all up and down his body, his eyes open to the sky. The boss said the doctor was in town and one of the men was going to have to take the boy there. John Henry walked away from the cart to a cistern. He dipped in a cup, two cups, and gulped the water down. He closed one nostril with a finger and blew forcefully, ejecting dust and snot, and repeated the process with the other nostril. The sun was almost down. He gulped at the air to take it into him.
The boss asked him what he was standing around for.
John Henry said he needed another shaker.
The boss spat into the ground and nodded. There was no shortage of niggers.
It was custom on nights like this (#ulink_ea724cac-bf49-5036-89f3-6a82f21874dd), when they were far from home, to share stories of what they had seen on their journeys. For they understood things about each other that no outsider ever could. The stories passed the time through the night and sustained them.
And so it comes to pass that when the van returns them to the hearth of the Talcott Motor Lodge, Dave Brown, Tiny and Frenchie repair to a room to drink and tell each other stories. Frenchie had swiped two bottles of tonic water while the bartenders put away the liquor, Dave Brown shares his stock of gin and Tiny grants his room for their meeting. After the drinks have been passed around and each man has slaked his thirst, Dave Brown says that what happened to J. reminds him of something he had seen years before, when he was young. His comrades lean forward to listen to his story and Dave Brown begins his tale.
“They were the greatest rock and roll band in the world—do you understand what I mean when I say that? They were a thing that could never be again. Those days are over. Today the record companies have that kind of hysteria down to a science. It’s a matter of mapping the demographics, man, but the thing about that time is, there wasn’t a demographic. We were all the same thing. Mick was singing about stuff we all did. Fucking around with girls in the backseat, cruising up and down the streets looking for something we couldn’t put our finger on but we knew it when we saw it. Satisfaction. We were all war babies. Mick and Keith knew what it was like to grow up in the fifties. It was the same over there as it was over here. They had the same parents. They were the war generation and we were the new generation.”
“Flower power.”
“You know me better than that. I’m saying it was different. It all seemed possible. That doesn’t sound like me, but that’s what it felt like and the Stones were a part of it. They made me want to write about music. Do you know what I mean? Talk to any rock writer of that time and they’ll talk about the Stones. You can argue for hours about the Apollonian and the Dionysian, but the dark wins every time so fuck the Beatles, just fuck ‘em, perspective-wise. In the long view. I’d come back from college and sit in my room with my little record player with my hand on the needle and transcribe their lyrics. I filled a whole notebook with Stones lyrics and my annotations—which blues song Keith had taken what riff from, which words Mick was cribbing from who. Before they got their own voice. And I still consider that my first book. You can go to the Museum of Television and Radio in New York and look up their early appearances and see what I’m talking about. Ready, Steady, Go in sixty-four. The girls screaming, God, you can smell their panties. This fucking whiff. Can you imagine what it must have been like for parents to watch that on television with their children and realize that their fresh-faced daughters all wanted to fuck that mangy scarecrow guy on stage? Not kiss and nuzzle, but actually fuck Mick Jagger. Hell, I wanted to fuck Mick and I’m as straight at they come. You can still feel it in those old black-and-white museum pieces. I looked them up last year when I was researching this thing for GQ. I had some time to kill so I got out the tapes of Ready, Steady, Go and T.A.M.I. And it all held up. One of the museum interns came by and I thought it was my father going to tell me to turn it down.
“So those were the good old days. By the summer of sixty-nine all those screaming girls had stopped cutting their hair and let those Annette Funicello bobs go to hell. They burned their bobby socks and tramped around in dirty feet and had run away from home to join the fabulous furry freak carnival. Most of the Stones’ TV appearances for the last few years had been on the news, not Ed Sullivan—they kept getting busted for various drug charges. Mostly a little pot, but that’s what it was like back them. Getting busted for a little grass was big news. Brian Jones was a corpse at this point. He was always the ragged prophet of the group, standing off behind Mick with that airy look in his eyes and then he finally lost it. I feel it is one of my primal personal fucking tragedies that I never met the man. They found his body in a swimming pool and that was the first bad thing, I think. That should have told everybody that the gig was up.
“By that point I had started writing and was getting published. Crawdaddy gave me some regular work in the back of the book, and I got some San Francisco scene pieces into Rolling Stone so I thought I was a big shot. They were just little scene things but I thought I had hit the big time. So when the Stones came to America for their first tour in three years, I was front and center. They’d hired Mick Taylor, that dumb shit, to take Brian’s place and got B. B. King and Ike and Tina to open up for them. I caught them in Los Angeles at the start of the tour and even got into this party for them in the Hollywood Hills. This guy I knew had the same dealer as the guy throwing it and we just walked right in.”
“Did you get to meet them?”
“Not until much later. I was a small fry, like I said. I met Mick later in New York during the Studio 54 days. But that was the older Mick. He was the elder statesman then, the settled-down and established rock star. Not Jumpin’ Jack Flash. Not like then. The first time I ever saw them live was at the Forum on the kickoff of that sixty-nine tour. In L.A., I drove down for it. They were incredible, of course. They’d been out of circulation and their flock was waiting for them. The greatest rock and roll band in the world. They came out under red lights on the stage and immediately ripped into ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash.’ Mick came out with this Uncle Sam hat and a red, white and blue cape, dancing like the devil, slapping his hands together with that dance he always does, sticking his neck out like a chicken and bumping his groin against the air like he was fucking some invisible pussy. It’s a gas gas gas. This was the Let It Bleed days, and Mick was doing his best satanic trip on the crowd and everybody loved it. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’—on one level it went against the vibe the kids had been working, but still they all bought it. It was channeling the inverse of all that, it was the anti-matter but it worked. Keith still looked halfway human back then, he had this crazy black hair on his head that looked like two crows fucking. He had those long spider arms and held the guitar as far as he could from his body when he played, like he was holding this pot of steaming tar that was too hot for him. He ripped into the songs, just looking up at Mick now and again to see which way they’d take the crowd. Bill Wyman was on the left with his long woman’s face, not doing much but doing his bit as usual and Charlie Watts just looking down at his kit, half his hawk face hidden by this sweep of brown hair, that was the look that was in, everybody had it. And Mick did his strut, hands waving the crowd up and urging them on. Sticking out those famous lips of his, he’d crack his body out like a hooker peddling blow jobs on Tenth Avenue. B. B. King and the Ikettes had stirred us all up all night and Mick took all that pent-up shit and released it. It was a wild night. I remember this guy standing next to me—he looked like a narc—and when the Stones came on he tapped me on the shoulder and passed me this skunky burnt-up joint. I was pretty high already and had seriously thought for the whole show that this guy, this schoolteacher next to me, was from the FBI. Just waiting to bust me. I was fucking obsessing on this guy all night. He didn’t say anything or move the whole show, not even when the Ikettes were shaking their tits at us. So he passes me this joint and I look in his eyes and his pupils are the size of fucking quarters. He had eaten a few tabs of what, I don’t know, that’s what it looked like, and was desperately trying to keep his shit together. Then the Stones came on finally and snapped him out of it and he was back in reality, almost anyway. Who knows what he saw up there, but it snapped him out of it.
“The tour started from there and went all across the country, selling out everywhere. They made something like a million dollars over the course of it, and that’s what got them into trouble. It was the time of free concerts and festivals and that’s what the kids wanted. They demanded it. It was their right. Of course they wanted it all for free—they were Americans. Woodstock and Hyde Park and the Isle of Wight—that’s what was going on. So the rock press got into the act. Ralph Gleason over at the Chronicle wrote a piece slamming the Stones for ripping off the kids and not giving anything back. Ralph thought they should give something back, basically accusing them of being sellouts. I always liked Ralph—he was one of the last moralists. So then Rolling Stone joined in the act and that pissed off the Stones to no end. Here was their comeback tour—they’d survived the drug busts and Brian’s death, and now they were being reviled by their fans. Or the press, rather. At every press conference, it was like, ‘so when are you going to do a free concert, when are you going to do something for the kids?’ So what I’m saying is that already the concert had a bad vibe on it. It was born more out of p.r. than love for what the kids were trying to do.”
“You’ve gone from ‘we’ to ‘the kids.’”
“Have I? It was a long time ago. Maybe I’m just in journalist mode right now. I’m trying to be objective.”
“And you sound like even more of a hippie than usual.”
“I always talk like this.”
“He’s right—he always talks like this.”
“But you went in for all that peace and love stuff, right? You always talk about it.”
“I’m just trying to get some objectivity in my account, if that’s okay with you, Tiny.”
“I saw the Rolling Stones a few years ago on one of their farewell tours. One of their many farewell tours. I have a hard time reconciling. I’m trying, but I don’t get it.”
“You had to be there, Frenchie. It was a whole period that they were a part of. That’s what I’m trying to get across.”
“Don’t get mad, I’m just saying. I’m more of a Hootie and the Blowfish man myself.”
“All right, all right. So at the end of the tour, the Stones announce that they want to do their free concert thing and they want to hold it in San Francisco. Only the city fathers want this outrageous insurance bond for Golden Gate Park, the natural place to play, so they had to find someplace else. They retain Melvin Belli, this old school gangster lawyer–type to handle the arrangements. At this point Belli is handling the Manson defense down in L.A. Nice, right? He flies up to San Francisco and does some wrangling and massaging and secures the Altamont Speedway, this old stock car racing track out in the desert about forty miles outside of San Francisco. And it’s on, December of 1969.
“We drove out there in Andy Farber’s old Mustang early in the morning. I don’t think you would’ve ever met Andy—he wrote the first really great mushroom piece—but he stopped writing in the early seventies and moved to Alabama to start a chicken farm. Andy and I were drinking this big jug of California red and smoking joints as we drove out there and it was a great morning. Sunny. We’d been up all night at the pad of this friend of his and we just kept going. And we headed out and every so often we pass a van or a car full of hippies and they honk and wave, and we wave back, it’s all good fun. There’s this great energy that we’re all just going to hang out and listen to music and smoke some grass and maybe get laid and it’s going to be a good time.”
“Were you writing about it?”
“I hadn’t intended to, but how couldn’t I after what I saw? I found out Rolling Stone was putting together a package about it and I got to work. Unfortunately, I started getting sick the day after the concert, and that turned into pneumonia because I wouldn’t stay in bed, and I couldn’t get it done, which was a bummer. But I later included it in my book Rock and Roll Memories. I gave you a copy of it, remember?”
“I’m not sure I got that far.”
“I see. Well, it’s in there. It’s the centerpiece of my chapter on the Death of the Sixties, which holds up as the final word on the subject, if you ask me. So we’re passing people on the road, and the road out there was getting packed with kids and pretty soon we realized that all the cars pulled over to the side of the road weren’t people stopping to get high—they’re parking. We thought we were getting there early, but people had been camping out all night for this thing. There was no more parking up at the site and now you had to fucking park like miles away and trek up there. So Andy nosed into this little space and we started walking. It was a caravan. Thousands of pilgrims hoofing it up there. Little gangs of kids who had driven from all over the country, carrying baskets and coolers, passing wrinkled-up joints. Walking barefoot to the mount. You’d walk up one brown hill only to see two other slopes beyond it and all of them were crawling with people. Look back and you’d see even more people, the ones who got their shit together even later than you, and they were coming up behind. People banging tambourines and goofing. It was the convocation of the freak nation. No one knew.
“And of course it was a bigger mess once we actually got to the site. It was a quarter of a million people. All you could really see was heads in the distance for miles it looked like. Of course those people couldn’t hear the amps, they just wanted to groove on the event. People sat down on the brown grass on their Indian mats and blankets, bunching up their sleeping bags as pillows. They’d dance a little hippie dance on one foot and then stop, everybody so fucked up. Girls were strutting around with their shirts off, tits flopping around with their crazy moves. Tits flopping all around—they didn’t care. Long hair flowing. This was the ground zero of the counterculture at that moment in the world. They had caravaned from New York, hey let’s go, man, and slept on the floor of vans or maybe they hitched all the way. They were yearning to be part of the free festival thing they’d heard about, this new happening. It was moving and horribly pathetic at the same time. You started to notice the bad freakouts little by little. One guy would be standing with his shirt off with his arms outstretched, staring off into the sun. And his mouth would start moving and he’d look confused and shocked, like he was realizing the worst thing in the world. Their friends would take them off to one of the Red Cross tents, which were totally overwhelmed. I later found out that Owlsey was there giving away free acid, and I don’t know if that’s what was causing it, but there was a lot of bad street acid making the rounds and that was doing serious damage. There were all these skinny malnourished dogs around, I remember that. They prowled around. The kids had found the dogs on the street and taken them in. Strays taking in strays. They couldn’t take care of themselves and they’d take a dog in. It was a stimulating atmosphere with all the stuff going on; everyone wants to play with a dog, and the dogs were able to deal with the kids but you felt they were only one day away from total wildness. They sniffed around the trash and mud like they were sniffing what was coming and already adapted to it. Ready to go wild and ugly, like nature intended for them all along. It was messy enough. And then I started to see the Angels.
“The Angels had been providing security for the Dead for the last year or so. Jerry and the boys dug hanging out with them—they were these tough customers, dose-of-reality characters who put the up-against-the-wall in up-against-the-walls, motherfuckers. When the Stones finalized the San Francisco show, Rock Skully, the Dead’s manager, set them up with the Hell’s Angels. To keep things cool. Now, I’ve never bought into the Angels’ mystique. I knew what they were before Altamont and I still know it. It was a stupid decision. The Stones bought the Oakland and San Francisco chapters of the Angels for five hundred dollars’ worth of beer—Budweiser, their choice, I’m sure. I saw the first one after we sat down. Andy and I staked out some space next to a bunch of fifteen-year-olds and Andy immediately sacked out and I was lying back and taking in the scene. We were pretty far from the stage, and you could hear Santana faintly-playing, but I was in no rush to move up closer. Then I heard that hog sound, that backfiring farting sound of their motorcycles, and looked up and saw people trying to move out of the way. I saw the Angel coming toward me, with his long dark greasy hair and dingy club leather, astride this massive chopper. The motherfucker was driving his motorcycle through the crowd, just nosing it forward and revving it every few feet to scare the kids. He had this little square of black hair under his lip that was almost, but not quite, a Hitler mustache, but he had obviously cut it that way so that Hitler was the first thing you thought when you saw it. I couldn’t see the Angel’s eyes because of his mirrored sunglasses, but I could see that we were in his way and he wasn’t making any motions to swerve away. I started trying to wake Andy, but he wasn’t having it. We’d been up all night and he was totally out. His mouth open like a dead fish. So I started slapping him, trying to get him awake, but he still wasn’t having it. I kept turning back to look at the Angel, who was still descending on us, slowly, like a shark, and then the Angel kind of did this slight nod thing and turned to the right. He smiled as he passed us and showed me his rickety brown teeth, what was left of them. From anyone else—on that day, in that scene, or anywhere else, for that matter—what he did would have been a simple kindness, but I looked into his teeth and knew he was trying to tell us that he could have run us over or not and it would have been the same thing.
“I left Andy there and started to walk around and the stories of the Angels started to trickle in. The Angels were getting violent. They attacked singly and in groups. Someone would accidentally brush against them and the Angels would whup them with a pool stick—they carried baseball bats and pool sticks that they filled with lead. These things connected with skulls. Or a kid might accidentally kick up some dust on one of their hogs and get beaten up. If an Angel started something, all of a sudden two or three other Angels would come swooping down and join in and help beat up whatever unfortunate soul had crossed their stupid white trash rules of propriety. They all had the same greasy look and feral eyes. They loved it—the dirt they wore on themselves was the natural progression from safe, middle-class hippie anarchy to total anarchy, anarchy in its natural state. When they laughed at one of the kids and picked on a flower child or couple and threw their Budweiser at the head of some kid in the middle of a freakout, they knew what they were doing. They were telling the kids that the Angels were the real deal. The kids were kids playing at something, and the Angels were that something all grown up.”
“Now you’ve gone from ‘we’ to ‘they’ to ‘the kids.’ Weren’t you the same age?”
“I was twenty-six at the time. I was a little too old to take it as seriously as, say, my younger brother did. I was just past the mark.”
“So you didn’t believe it all.”
“I did or I wanted to—it’s the same difference, isn’t it?”
“All those people have straight jobs now, right? Run the country and what not?”
“That would be true.”
“This is the elegy for the lost boomer.”
“Like I said, I left Andy to his stupor and started walking the desert. The Altamont Speedway had agreed to hold the concert because the owners were basically bankrupt. It was in the middle of nowhere, just a mess of dead grass for miles in every direction, but now it had been taken over by the freaks. The towering amp scaffolds went up sixty feet in the air and the kids climbed up on them like black bugs. I saw one person climb halfway up and then lose his grip in a druggy haze, hang there for a minute, and then he fell down in the crowd where I lost him among the heads. I’d pass these abandoned stock cars here and there, rusted through and totally crashed up. Teenagers’d set up shop, spread out their Indian blanket on the backseat and ball. Some people didn’t feel as modest and rolled around in sleeping bags, or out in the open, even. Well-heeled white chicks from Marin made the rounds asking for contributions to the Panther Defense Fund and giving speeches about the struggle. Like they were war widows. I was missing most of the action on stage, but I didn’t care. I’d get there eventually. I was pretty fucked up, so I don’t know why I’m casting so many aspersions on the kids, but I’d never seen so many people in such obvious trouble in one place before. The street acid was taking its toll. I got accosted by this head in a fringe leather jacket who peered at me through Peter Tork sunglasses. He grabbed on to me, dried grass in his hair, and kept jabbering at me until I finally had to knock him to the ground. He just looked up at me and smiled and said, ‘You got it, man, you got it.’ Everyone panting in communal, barefoot freakout. The sky had gone gray. The sun wasn’t out anymore and the air was getting chilly. The p.a. warned people about bad acid, where to take lost children, and gave directions to the Red Cross tents. I saw a young woman with blood on her tie-dyed shirt and asked her if she needed any help. She said, ‘It’s beautiful, man. I just helped deliver a baby.’ It’s beautiful. She stumbled off and I just thought, what kind of woman who’s about to give birth would come out into the desert for this? That’s beautiful? People were getting seriously hurt. In the days after the concert, people kept mentioning that four people died and four babies were born, as if that was some kind of equation that balanced all the negativity out. But it didn’t. Four babies born, two people run over by cars while they slept in sleeping bags, one guy passed out in an irrigation ditch and drowned in a puddle, and of course what happened during the Stones’ set. It doesn’t balance out.
“The Angels continued to crack heads open through each act. As the Jefferson Airplane started ‘Revolution,’ Marty Balin jumped off stage to break up a fight—the Angels had started picking on this black guy near the front of the stage and Marty jumped in to break it up. And the Angels turned their fangs on him and beat him unconscious. They beat the lead singer of the Jefferson Airplane unconscious. I was still far from the stage but I heard Paul Kantner—the guitarist—take the mike and start berating the Angels. So one of them grabbed a mike and told him to shut up. They were in control. I didn’t like Marty personally—he had snubbed me at a party a few months before and though I retaliated by saying a few unkind things in print later on, I still held a grudge—but obviously the scene was now out of control. They’d beaten up a rock star, for Christ’s sake. But the show went on. The Angels controlled the night.
“I woke up and it was dark. I had a little more stamina than Andy, but the last night’s partying had finally caught up with me and I crawled into one of the junked cars and fell asleep. I vaguely remember doing that. I woke up and had all these seat springs digging into my back. I got out of the car and asked a kid if I’d missed the Stones and he told me that’s what they were all waiting for. People had ripped down the speedway fencing to make bonfires, so that lit things up a bit, I could see people dancing naked in the orange glow. You know, burn, baby, burn. Shit. And the film crew’s lights helped. The Maysles brothers were filming the concert—Mick was jealous that the Woodstock movie was coming out in a few weeks and he wasn’t in it, so he got the Maysles to film his own free concert. People were singing Stones songs like that would summon them out of their trailer and then an Angel would glide by and drown them out with his motorcycle. But then one time the hog sound didn’t cut out. It got louder and the sea of people parted and this wedge of Angels came driving up through the people like an arrow. And between their motorcycles came the Stones, protected from the crowd by their bad-ass bodyguards. The screaming got massively loud. I got myself into the wake of the Harleys and pushed myself forward to the stage. I felt the thousands at my back, hungering behind me. As the Angels helped the Stones up onstage, I saw that it was full of people. Angels, hangers-on, anyone who could still stand and control their body was up there. It was ridiculous, man. I weaseled my way to the right, and got a pretty good view. At one point one of the cameramen zoomed in on me, but I never made it into the movie.
“The big banks of lights showered the stage with a hellish red light from above. There was barely enough room onstage for the band with all those fucking Angels, but the Stones took their places. I saw this German shepherd, one of the Angels’ dogs, hoof around the mikes, eyes as greedy and hungry as those of its masters. Behind me, the miles of people pushed forward. It was the moment they had all been waiting for. Deliverance time. It was night and the greatest rock and roll band in the world was going to take them to their reward. And then it broke—Keith started to drag his claws across the strings and Mick twirled his black and orange cape and they started into ‘Carol.’ The crowd surged forward all of a sudden—we were as close together as we could have been and they wanted more. More people wanted in. It all came down to this, I thought. A few yards away, this hepcat in a Nehru jacket—Nehru jacket, shit—tumbled into one of the Angel’s hogs because the crowd pushed him and of course first one then two Angels started beating him. I was pushed forward by the shift in the crowd so I lost sight of it—the last I saw of him was a volley of pool sticks coming down on his head like lightning. The Stones must’ve known it was too violent in the crowd to play, I know for a fact they knew what was going on, but they kept playing. Thing is, it wasn’t even that great a set. Totally uninspired. All the energy they’d had in L.A. had totally dissipated by the end of the tour. They were doing the show, they were doing what they did best, but they couldn’t hide the fact that it had been a long couple of months. Maybe they didn’t take a stronger stand against the Angels because they just wanted it to be over. They just wanted to play their final set and get the fuck out of America. They’d been bullied by what the press and what the public expected, the pop had shifted and forced them into this. Or maybe they were scared of the Angels, of what they had wrought, and if that was the case then they should never have gone into ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’ It was just stupid. Mick in his Satan mode asked the crowd to please allow him to introduce himself, lit up all red against the black desert night, and the Angels took their places. The Angels brought their wrath upon the hippies, raising their baseball bats and pool sticks upon the heads of the kids. The kids all clambered and rushed up to get up to the front of the stage, they ran up to the Gates and the Angels swung down on them. Mick tried to stop it and the Stones quit the song. Mick said, cool it, cut it out. As if he were still in control. The Angels dragged away some people and things calmed down a bit. Mick joked, “Something funny always happens when we start that song,” as if he thought that you could say the words of the spell and then act surprised when you smelled brimstone.
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Colson Whitehead
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: From the author of ‘The Underground Railroad’, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and Longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.‘John Henry Days’ is a novel of extraordinary scope and mythic power. It established Colson Whitehead as a pre-eminent American writer of our time.Building the railways that made America, John Henry died with a hammer in his hand moments after competing against a steam drill in a battle of endurance. The story of his death made him a legend.Over a century later, J. Sutter, a freelance journalist and accomplished expense account abuser, is sent to West Virginia to cover the launch of a new postage stamp at the first ′John Henry Days′ festival.John Henry Days is a work of extraordinary scope, revealing how a nation creates its present through the stories it tells of its past.