Thanks to my orphan jackpot, I didn’t work full-time like most of my housemates. June had offered to help if I needed it, and she was keeping
tabs on me. But I was well used to paying my own way. The monthly house fees came out of my social security account, and part-time at Walmart covered the rest. The entertainments of sober living are all those best things in life that are said to be free. Breathing, sleeping, enjoying your newly regularized bowels. Eating your own bad cooking. Bumming Camels and playing penny poker, listening to two Kentucky boys tell Tennessee jokes that you grew up telling as Kentucky jokes. Listening to hair-raising tales of the hood, in a language you wish had subtitles. I spent a lot of time at the library.
The main librarian at our branch was Lyra. Not your father’s Oldsmobile.
She had cherry-red hair with short, straight bangs, and a full sleeve tattoo representing the book of Moby-Dick. Sinking schooner, curling waves, wrathful whale. She wore shorts, spiderweb tights and motorcycle boots in all weather. Deadpan flirt. I hadn’t been laid since Dori, not even once. It’s a level of death, knowing another body that well, that’s touched every part of yours, thinking about it now cold in the ground. Some days, that killed me. Others, I felt nothing. Sex was just a vague and troublesome part of the feverish life I’d put on the other side of a glass wall. The counselors warn you this may be the case, and advise against romantic involvements till
you’re on solid ground with your recovery. Triple underlined, if you’re a young man with multiple mommy issues and a thing for hot-mess rescue cases that are doomed to suck you under. Lyra seemed pretty solid, but I knew me and involvements. I couldn’t poke a stick at that beast without
getting swallowed alive. This one came to work with weed on her breath and seemed in every sense a party girl. I opted not to find out.
We found other ways to share. She liked books obviously and pointed quite a few my way, some that made me smarter, some just weird. She helped me study for my GED, which turned out to be a hell of a lot easier
than being physically present to two more years of disgrace and overpriced drugs cut with sheep wormer. Which would have been my lot, as a fallen General. I think most of humankind would agree, the hard part of high school is the people.
Lyra’s secret love was computers. She set me up with email, and showed me how to use the library’s scanner to upload my drawings. Red Neck as mentioned had to sleep it off for six months, but as soon as I had two sticks to rub together in my brainbox, I got right back on the job. Tommy had what he needed at the paper office so we could trade sketches. He pitched story ideas, I drew them, he shaded and inked. With both operatives sober, our efficiency was first class. Pinkie wanted to renew us for another year.
With some sadness, we decided against. We were both moving on.
Tommy finally met his girlfriend, and it was the real thing. Sophie was crazy about Tommy, and so was her mom’s family, that threw a big dinner for all the relatives to check him out. Tommy came back home, gave Pinkie two weeks’ notice, untangled himself from the McCobb utility space, and moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania. He and Sophie got married at the Polish-American Citizens Club, followed by a huge reception with a polka band. Get me a hankie, somebody, and I’m not kidding. Tommy had a family. Before I saw him next, he would be a father.
On my end, I’d outgrown superheroes, even the much-needed hillbilly kind. The Fleischer style of Red Neck was hemming me in, those bulbous eyes and noodle limbs felt babyish. I wanted to try something harder-core. Lyra was educating me, and not in the ways my idle mind had toyed with. After turning me on to the adult comics and graphic novels section of the library, she showed me what was going on in the world of online comics, which rocked my marbles. She walked me through building my own website. Mainly this involved me getting out of her way so she could click furiously at the keys while I lost myself in the dramatic oceanscape of her
left arm. I could upload my drawings to the site, and in this fashion I started my enterprise. Like most of Mr. McCobb’s, it made no money whatsoever for the first year. Unlike him, I stuck to it. It was my own little universe,
created under my alias, Demon Copperhead. I was far from the football field and Lee County lore now, and had gotten used to my mom’s name again. Most people called me Fields. But I had this whole other part I didn’t want to lose. My dad.
It started with my long-ago idea of Neckbones. With Tommy’s permission, I did some of our famous local histories through the eyes of skeletons. Knox Mine disaster, Natural Tunnel train wreck. I also messed around with the idea I’d had in my saddest days with Dori: The Incapables, a strip about a junkie couple trying to keep house. The guy was Crash and
the girl was Bernie, two teenagers trying to raise themselves. They grilled hot dogs on their car engine while driving around to find their connect, and did household repairs with bongs and roach clips. To the best of my abilities, I made it sad and true to the laughable mess of addicted youth.
Also bitter. In one of my strips, Crash is filling his pill-mill scrip and the pharmacy lady leans over to warn him, “This one’s strong, hon. The Purdue rep takes it so he can sleep nights.”
I’m not saying there was a market for any of this. But the days of the big village were just starting. If there’s a shoe out there for every foot, the lonely and oddball foot by means of the internet had a vastly improved
chance of finding it. My weird cartoons got a little following that grew, and after a year I sold subscriptions. Not very many. Luckily, I wasn’t in it for
the money. One thing I learned from Mr. Armstrong while striving heartily to remain uneducated: a good story doesn’t just copy life, it pushes back on it. It’s why guys like Chartrain wear their clothes too big and their teeth edged with gold, why Mr. Dick puts words on kites and sends them to the sun. It’s why I draw what I draw.
Angus stayed in touch. She followed my comics, which she liked, and sent updates from the Nashville front: college was hard, college kids were a bunch of spoiled brats, and everybody including professors made fun of her mountain accent. She was there on scholarship, and hadn’t understood she was going to be fraternizing with, as she put it, cake eaters and princes of capitalism. Good to see Angus holding on to her winning personality.
She told me what classes she liked, and what nonsense the rich sorority
girls were up to, so needy of attention they would pretend it was too hot and take off their jewelry in class. And how certain skeezy teaching assistants
were stealth-undressing those girls with their eyes. Nashville she liked, as a
town. Dive bars, bookstores, amazing food from countries you’ve not even heard of. Both of us were in Tennessee theoretically, but a half-day’s drive and a couple universes apart. She said in Nashville you could see anybody famous on a given day, Brooks or Dunn, Carrie Underwood etc., because even if not living there, they’re hanging around town waiting to make their albums. She saw Dolly goddamn Parton one time in the grocery store buying head lettuce. I told her the celebrity I saw buying vegetables was Crazy Marv from the “At these prices you’ll know I’ve lost my marbles” used-car commercials.
With Tommy finally living his life, his emails petered out. You had to reckon Sophie was the one getting her ears full now, theorywise. Apart from meetings and my counselors doing their jobs, Angus was the only person anymore to ask what I was going through. How much did I still think about using, how did I keep it together. How’s that wild ride going, was I ready to trust it yet. I told her about the inspirations of black coffee and the deep black bottom I was terrified to hit again. And the pink pill I put under my tongue every morning to keep all the other ones out of there for the rest of my days, so far, so good. I confessed my secret itch to do a comics version of the AA Big Book. I told her about Viking, Gizmo, and Chartrain. On her end, she’d comment on somebody she studied with or partied with, this cat named Jacko she took a trip with over spring break.
But no one name ever came to the fore. More often than not, she went home on her school vacations, sometimes going down to stay with Miss Betsy and Mr. Dick. That surprised me, her going back. I thought for sure in a place
like Nashville with everybody working their angles hell for leather, Angus would find her people. But it didn’t seem so.
Maggot meanwhile was back in touch, finally ready to forgive me for my brief fit of high school popularity. He thought The Incapables was dead hilarious, and was always sending me ideas that were too third-grade or too adult-raunchy to use. No in-betweens with that guy. He and his mom both had jobs at PetSmart, of all places. He had a boyfriend he met at work. I said congratulations, was he one of those smash-faced bulldogs or what. He said no, skunk breath, he’s the reptiles manager. We were still Demon and Maggot.
My number-one fan though turned out to be Ms. Annie, that now wanted me to call her just Annie. Mr. Armstrong I was supposed to call Lewis.
They both put a lot of fan raves on my site, which I could always tell were
theirs even though under multiple fake names. They used words like
“innovative” and “visionary,” dead giveaway this was teachers, not kids and junkies. Regardless Ms. Annie’s prediction, I was nothing but the lowest level of potato, but you’d think I was the most dazzling success they’d ever had as a student. Lewis was in big trouble with the school board as usual, so the honor you could say was dubious.
What changed everything was Tommy calling me up, out of the blue. The History of our People thing, he hadn’t let go. Maybe homesick. Or having trouble explaining us rednecks to his new family, as you do. Anyway, so excited on the phone he doesn’t start with hello. Demon! I know why we’re the dogshit of America, it’s a war, and it’s been going on the whole time, and nobody gets it, not even us. You have to do a graphic novel about it.
This, at three motherfucking o’clock in the goddamn morning. I said I couldn’t wait to hear all about it tomorrow.
Oh, I did. He claimed he was on the right track as far as the two kinds of economy people, land versus money. But not city people against us personally. It’s the ones in charge, like government or what have you. They were always on the side of the money-earning people, and down on the land people, due to various factors Tommy mentioned, monetize this, international banking that. The main one I could understand was that money-earning ones pay taxes. Whereas you can’t collect shit on what
people grow and eat on the spot, or the work they swap with their neighbors. That’s like a percent of blood from a turnip. So, the ones in charge started cooking it into everybody’s brains to look down on the land people, saying we are an earlier stage of human, like junior varsity or cavemen. Weird-shaped heads.
Tommy was watching TV these days, and seeing finally how this shit is everywhere you look. Dissing the country bumpkins, trying to bring us up to par, the long-termed war of trying to shame the land people into joining America. Meaning their version, city. TV being the slam book of all times, maybe everybody in the city was just going along with it, not really noticing the rudeness factors. Possibly to the extent of not getting why we are so fucking mad out here.
It took a lot of emails of Tommy telling me how far back it went, this offensive to wedge people off their own holy ground and turn them into
wage labor. Before the redneck miner wars, the coal land grabs, the timber
land grabs. Whiskey Rebellion: an actual war. George Washington marched the US Army on our people for refusing to pay tax on corn liquor. Which they weren’t even selling for money, mainly just making for neighborly entertainment. How do you get tax money out of moonshine? Answer: You and what army. It goes a ways to explaining people’s feelings about taxes and guns.
Tommy said the world was waiting for a graphic novel about the history of these wars. I told him the world could hold its horses then, because I didn’t have the foggiest idea how to do that. Then went to bed, woke up, and started drawing it. He fed me story lines like kindling on a fire. I wanted to call it Hillbilly Wars, but he said no, people would think the usual cornball nonsense, hill folk shooting each other. Plus he pointed out there
were other land-type people in the boat with us. The Cherokees that got kicked off their land. All the other tribes, same. Black people after they
were freed up, wanting their own farms but getting no end of grief for it, till they gave up and went to the city.
Surprisingly, Angus was all over this. I’d been trying to get her interested in comics for an age. Then in college she discovers graphic novels like she invented them. Always sending me the latest one she’s crazy about. Not your run-of-the-mill sci-fi and crime, this girl was into dark. Jewish mice in the Nazi concentration camps. Kids growing up in a funeral home. The
Incapables, she called fierce. I’d been telling her this forever, adult comics are all over the map. But not a single one out there has us in it, she said. Not wrong.
I ended up calling it High Ground. The two-hundred-years war to keep body and soul together on our mountains. I started putting up chapters on my site as I finished them, earning a weird and intense fan club, part history professors, part good ol’ boys. Then a guy emailed to say his company published graphic novels and might be interested in mine, could I send him all the material I had. This guy was in New York. Did he seriously think I was handing over my goods?
I talked to Annie on the phone pretty regularly, but after this news she wanted to see me in person. A book deal, Christ on a bike, quote unquote. She would look at everything I had, and help me put together a proposal. She offered to come to Knoxville. At this point Annie is something like eight months pregnant, if I didn’t mention that. You turn your back, shit happens. The sensible thing was for me to go to her.
Technically there was no reason I couldn’t. In three and a half years as a sober living resident, month by month, I’d earned a life without curfew, driving my own wheels, weekends away. The house managers were actually dropping hints. Viking was back in Bell County now, and Gizmo was lining up his options. There was literally no end to the line of guys waiting to get in here. But I couldn’t imagine going anywhere. Especially back there.
Driving wasn’t the problem, I still had an active license, which the other guys in the house regarded as magical. They’d all DUI’ed out, many times over, and here’s me without even a moving violation. I tried to explain Lee County, where all the cops are your relatives or dope boys or both. I did not have the Impala. My last act before leaving Lee County was to talk Turp Trussell into giving me two hundred dollars for the car and any pills he could find in there. In less than a month he ran it through a guardrail on that stretch of 421 people call “the hateful section.” Turp was shockingly intact, the Impala, RIP. Getting this news was like hearing that a childhood dog had to be put down. But there would be other cars in my life. From a friend of Chartrain’s mom, I scored an abused but affordable rescue Chevy Beretta, robin’s-egg blue, to celebrate one year sober. A month or so after that, I got up the nerve to drive it downtown. A year is a long time away from the wheel. Straight into city driving, quite the plunge. I tried to keep my eyes open and channel June Peggot parallel parking outside the Atlanta Starbucks. I’m in awe of that maneuver to this day. Men have married women for less reason.
So I had a car. I had Annie’s invitation, and my freedom. Means, motive, and opportunity, as they say on CSI. Nothing holding me back now but sheer terror. It’s hard to explain how you can miss a place and want it with all your heart, and be utterly sure it will obliterate you the instant you touch down. I said this to the counselor I still saw every week, Dr. Andresen, that was part of the house arrangement along with water and utilities. As far from Miss Barks as they get. Older lady, gray sweaters buttoned to the top, black clog shoes, professional and educated and decently paid I assume.
She was from Denmark, first name of Milka, and for all that, a very likable human. She’d talked me through a boatload of crap, and honestly it was less distracting to do this with a counselor that you couldn’t remotely imagine doing anything else with. Dr. Andresen weighed in on the side of me going to Lee County. Or at least examining my fears. I asked her, what part of
obliterate do you not understand?
She gave me the assignment of writing a story, in which Demon goes to Lee County and sees friends who support his sobriety. What I turned in: “On a planet that exists only in Dr. Andresen’s mind, a good time was had by all, and nobody got shitfaced.” She gave me her tiny lopsided smile, being used to my attitude on assignments. Didn’t stop her from giving them to me. Practically from our first meeting, she’d been after me to write a recovery journal. I told her I don’t write, I draw. She said this would be for myself only. I could share it, but only if I chose to do so. The idea being to get clarity and process some of my traumas. On that particular ball of yarn I didn’t know where to start. She suggested pinpointing where my struggles had started with substance abuse, abandonment, and so forth. She said many people find this is a helpful tool for reclaiming their narratives, and in fact wasn’t this what I was doing with my comics?
Whatever. I’ve made any number of false starts with this mess. You think you know where your own troubles lie, only to stare down the page and realize, no. Not there. It started earlier. Like these wars going back to George Washington and whiskey. Or in my case, chapter 1. First, I got myself born. The worst of the job was up to me. Here we are.
