Having spent significant and affecting years in each of them, I claim to have five hometowns (and never mind that not one of them would likely lay claim to me). Listed in reverse order, they are: La Conner and Seattle in Washington state; Richmond and Warsaw in Virginia; and Blowing Rock, North Carolina, the town where I was born, the final resting place of my kin, and the site of all the events so far described in this account.
It’s a bit of an understatement to say that Blowing Rock is in the mountains. The highest incorporated town east of the Rockies, Blowing Rock is on the mountains, atop the mountains. From Blowing Rock, baby, it’s all downhill.
The town took its name from a geological formation, an actual rock, an immense cliff of metamorphic gneiss, a jutting promontory that protrudes like God’s sore thumb out over the Johns River Gorge more than three thousand feet below. It’s possible to rather easily climb out onto the rock, and marvel there at a panoramic view any postcard would die for, though the perch is not for the vertiginous. Okay, but why “Blowing”?
The rocky walls of the gorge form a flume through which silent winds sweep with considerable force, although atop the rock itself it’s usually calm. A visitor can toss a handkerchief, a paper cup, or any light object off of the cliff, watch it go spiraling hundreds of feet down down down into the purplish mist far below, until a mysterious current suddenly seizes it, lifts it up up up and blows it back over the head of the tosser, who may then turn, retreat a few yards, and retrieve that which he or she has tossed (hopefully, not his or her cookies). In winter at the Rock, the snow falls upside down.
It’s unthinkable that a natural phenomenon of this order, as mystifying as it is spectacular, would not generate local myth. In recent years, the mythology surrounding the Rock has taken on complex cinematic properties, as if rewritten by a Chamber of Commerce booster with a made-for-TV sensibility, but the simpler and somehow sweeter legend I heard as a child went like this:
A Cherokee maiden has received word via the tom-tom telegraph that her lover and husband-to-be has been killed in battle. Inconsolable, the distraught girl goes to the Rock and hurls herself, wailing, into the abyss. Before she hits bottom, however, sympathetic and all-knowing wind spirits catch her, bear her aloft, blow her back onto the Rock and into the arms of her approaching lover, who it turns out was only wounded, not slain as the drums reported.
Now, growing up in that landscape and in that narrative (my young pals and I were all over the Rock like ants over a loaf, my imagination swam in the mythology like sperm in a love bath), how could I have not succumbed to romanticism?
The dark woods, the singing creeks, the stars just barely out of reach; the great stone ships, their prows pointed eternally at elsewhere. Air as clean as freshly laundered bedsheets; owls hooting from hidden linen closets, asking who, who, who dares to follow the bear god’s spoor down oblique paths where reality is a network of shadows and time is prone to lose its bearings? And scattered everywhere among the pines -- like the topaz droplets of resin that frescoed our bare heels in summer -- were ancient invisible Cherokee kisses, kisses known to have triumphed over death.
When in addition to the natural environment and prevailing folklore, we factor into the equation fairy-tale books with their lovelorn princes and princesses, the chivalrous tales of King Arthur’s knights, and the movies in which Tarzan went swinging through the greenery with Jane on his hip, we may arrive at an algorithm that explains why Tommy Rotten gave his heart to Nancy Lentz (or was it Toni?) and his own paleface kisses to Gwendolyn Berryman.
Tarzan movies were indeed screened in Blowing Rock (from the moment I first beheld loinclothed Johnny Weissmuller traversing with a wild yodel the free space between heaven and earth, Jesus was permanently dislodged from his position atop my fiery pantheon), although the films were shown only in summer. Let me explain.
Blowing Rock was a summer resort, and a rather posh one. Lured by the area’s beauty and cool mountain air, wealthy families from throughout the Southeast maintained summer residences there. The Cannon textile barons had a huge estate, as did the R. J. Reynolds tobacco clan, and the Coca-Cola Snyders from down in muggy Atlanta. Beginning in early June, our sidewalks sported pedestrians in tennis whites and gold jewelry, our streets opened their asphalt arms to European sports cars and luxury sedans. There were boutiques with flagship stores in West Palm Beach and Boca Raton, a produce stand that displayed fruits (avocados, papayas, yellow plums) that no hillbilly could identify let alone afford; and then there was the movie theater that showed first-run films as soon as they opened in Los Angeles and New York -- until Labor Day Tuesday, that is, when it went as dark as the Tomb of the Unknown Gaffer.
It was an annual occurrence. Come June, the merry masquerade began; come September, Appalachian reality settled upon the community with a mournful sigh. The shops were shuttered, golf courses deserted, the last fancy auto went Cadillacking down the mountain and out of town. Even the Louis XVI colors of the autumn leaves failed to paint over the detail that many residents would have to survive for nine months on what they’d earned in three. There would now be fatback suppers, rotgut hangovers, malnourished kids, flour-sack fashions, occasional stabbings; and always outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, scabies, and head lice. And then . . . and then June would jack out of its box and life would get healthy and merry again.
Unconsciously, Tommy Rotten learned a great lesson from this seasonal seesaw. As his brain involuntarily traced the arc between the glamorous and the drab and back again, he became attuned to the rhythms of change, to the balance of opposites, to the yang and the yin, to the rise and fall of the cosmic pumpkin; and he came to take a kind of solace in the knowledge that paradox is the engine that runs the universe. In the novels he was to write as an adult, transformation (along with liberation and celebration) was a major theme.
It would be a mistake to suggest that the off-season in Blowing Rock, for all of its hardships, was devoid of interest. Au contraire. Even during the long Decembers of the Great Depression, the place exuded a fascinating flavor. For a boy with a kinetic imagination, it could be nothing short of magical.
Allowed to roam freely in both the streets and the woods, I observed and interacted not only with the wonders of nature but with an assortment of squirrel hunters, rabbit trappers, berry pickers, banjo pickers, moonshiners, tramps, real Gypsies, snake handlers, muleback preachers (like my grandpa), eccentric characters with names such as Pink Baldwin and Junebug Tate, and perhaps most influential, bib-overalled raconteurs, many of whom spun stories as effortlessly and expertly as they spit tobacco juice.
All of this gave me an appetite for enchantment -- and I haven’t even mentioned the pastor’s little daughters, with whom, at their invitation, I used to play “doctor.” In this game, participants took turns being patient and physician. Highly instructive, it was hands-on, anatomically correct, and nobody on either end of the examination table gave a rip about insurance. Harvard Medical School, eat your heart out!
Any consideration of Blowing Rock’s influence that fails to mention The Bark is incomplete. A roadhouse on the outskirts of town, The Bark took its name from the unmilled cedar shakes with which it was sided, and its interior was as notorious as its exterior was rustic. Behind that rough facade, customers drank beer and danced, activities that to any good Southern Baptist invoked the Devil himself.
My mother, a stalwart in the church (her father, like my father’s father, was a Baptist preacher), taught a Sunday school class for committed Christians in their late teens and early twenties. On Wednesday evenings, the class met at our house. The meetings were part religious, part social; and after prayers, as young Baptists nibbled cookies and sipped punch, gossip (evidently not a sin) would typically bloom. Invariably, someone would blurt out, if it’s possible to blurt in a hushed tone, “Mary Jones was seen leaving The Bark Friday night.” Or, “Saturday, Daddy saw John Doe’s pickup parked at The Bark, and it was there for hours and hours.”
These b
its of intelligence were always greeted with audible gasps, followed by much wagging of chin and clucking of tongue. If The Bark was forbidden fruit, then the shock, the awe with which they spoke of it, applied a polish, a sheen to its peel that in my imagination (I was eight, nine at the time) glowed like a peach of solid gold. I grew as attracted to that roadhouse as to the jungles of Tarzan and Jane.
On our way to the Rock or one or another of our various woodland hideouts, my buddies and I frequently passed The Bark, and we tended to pause there for long minutes and stare at the place, as if it were an evil castle where a great treasure was stored. Once in a while we’d see gentlemen emerge (after, we knew, a bout of drinking and dancing inside); we’d see some tattooed fellow with a cigar in his teeth, and with what the Sunday school crowd called a “floozy” on his arm; watch the couple straddle a big Harley-Davidson and go roaring out of the red clay parking lot, enveloped in an oxygen of freedom about whose perils and rewards we could scarcely guess. At those moments, all I wanted was to quickly become old enough to drink beer, dance, get tattooed, smoke cigars, ride motorcycles, and have a floozy of my own on my arm.
Eventually I was to accomplish all of those things -- and they proved in no way a disappointment. Who said The Bark was worse than its bite?
5
crime, art & death
The Hannah brothers, Georgie and Jimmy, were Iraqi Jews, actually born in Baghdad. Their father was a rug merchant who sold fine Oriental carpets in Blowing Rock every summer, in Florida the rest of the year. The day each June when Georgie and Jimmy arrived back in town was for me an occasion more anticipated and more exciting than Christmas. They were my favorite playmates, for their imagination equaled my own. The Hannah brothers excelled at making wooden swords and ray guns, at piecing together the funky costumes (cowboys, Indians, pirates, spacemen, jungle lords, etc.) apparently necessary for acting out our bizarrely improvised versions of recent movie scenes -- as well as at sneaking into matinees at the theater where we studied such scenes far more attentively than we’d ever studied arithmetic.
All summer long we strived to outdo one another with the creativity of our variations on cinematic or comic-book themes, performing in backyards, along mountain trails, on the broken porches of “haunted” houses (daring one another to go inside), around the perimeters of golf courses, and in the gardens of the Mayview Manor Hotel, where we’d sometimes catch glimpses of vacationing celebrities. (We saw Bob Hope there, Jimmy Stewart, and General Eisenhower, but, alas alas, never Johnny Weissmuller.)
When, after Labor Day, Georgie and Jimmy were sadly returned to Sarasota, the limitless galaxy of make-believe all too quickly gave way to the mundane world of school. I still had my reading and writing, however. I also had Johnny Holshauser, a year-round boy, my next best friend, and -- oh, the shame! -- my partner in actual crime.
One half-warm spring afternoon, Johnny and I were moping about, bored with the accumulated inertia at church and school, despondent over our chronic lack of funds. We had not a dime for a comic book, not a nickel for a candy bar, not even a penny for a gumball -- and at age seven going on eight, attempting to barter our pants for financial gain would have been neither cute nor profitable. All at once, or maybe it unfolded gradually, we had an idea, a strategy, a ploy. It was simple. We’d rob a bank.
Of course, it was hardly an original solution. All through the Great Depression, proactive young fellows with neither money nor prospects had discovered that robbing banks could impact their cash flow in a positive if not always sustainable manner.
Johnny and I each owned a cap pistol that fairly closely resembled an actual handgun. Thus armed, we marched into the Northwestern State Bank on Blowing Rock’s main drag, pointed our pieces at an astonished teller, and demanded “a lot of money.” Mind you, this was no prank. We were completely serious. Everything went very quiet for a moment or two. Then the shooting began.
At least, we thought it was shooting. In those days there was an item of fireworks called “torpedoes,” a misleading name since in size and shape they resembled those gumballs we couldn’t afford. They were like dry, gray jawbreakers that when hurled against a hard surface, exploded with a loud report. Obviously unknown to us, the bank had a supply of said torpedoes, and one or more of the employees surreptitiously began throwing them at the marble walls and floor. Johnny bolted for the door, me right behind him, both convinced that bullets were whizzing past our heads.
We hightailed it through town, took a back road up a steepish hill, and barreled into the woods, not stopping until we reached a primitive lean-to, one of our aforementioned hideouts. There, breathless, we collapsed on the pine needles. And waited. Waited. Listening for sirens or other signals that the police or a posse of vigilantes was on our trail.
Hours passed. Darkness fell. A heavy chill, like an ice-hoofed horse, clattered in and out among the rhododendron and huckleberry bushes. Owls hooted. We heard growling that might have been a bear. A mountain lion. Or the bogeyman. Or our empty stomachs. Finally, unable to stand it another minute, we crept hungrily, nervously, sheepishly, back to our respective homes.
News of the aborted holdup had spread quickly through town that afternoon. Most citizens got a good laugh out of it, though my parents could not be counted among the amused. Following a brief lecture, surely to be continued, I was given toast and milk -- thanks, perhaps, to the Geneva Conventions -- and ordered to bed.
In my room, I lay awake, troubled by guilt, scorched by embarrassment, worried about inevitable repercussions. Yet, with a secret smile, I couldn’t help thinking, If Georgie and Jimmy Hannah had been with us, we could have pulled it off.
Having in my seventies developed a mild and belated interest in genealogy, I hired a professional to look into my ancestry. To my delight she discovered a few odd nuts (if their names be any clue) dangling from the old family tree. For example, there was Smallwood Marlow, Marvel Greene, Mountain Issac Greene, Nimrod Triplett, Commodore (his name not his rank) Robbins, and most intriguing of all, a woman listed as Elizabeth Gotobed. Most of these splendidly christened individuals resided in North Carolina, though none in Blowing Rock per se.
Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) obviously didn’t live in Blowing Rock either, but it turns out that I’m a direct descendant of that luminary. Moved by this newfound knowledge to reread Robinson Crusoe, I was dismayed to find that Defoe was an imperialist, a racist, a sexist, and somewhat of a literary hack -- which is to say, in his entire book there is not one sentence so daring or so beautiful or so funny or so wise that I’d give twenty-five dollars to have written it (a screwy way to judge talent, I agree, but there you have it).
Ultimately, I’m far less enthused about my kinship with Daniel Defoe than with Polly Elrod (1833–1924), my great-grandmother and arguably the first Pop artist in America.
Polly lived within walking distance of Blowing Rock -- if you didn’t mind a two-day walk each way. My father, in the company of his own pa, made the hike when he was a boy. The Elrod cabin was way back in the hills, up one of those deep valleys that we hillbillies called “hollers,” unreachable except on foot. Daddy and Papa crashed in a hospitable farmer’s hayloft their first night on the trail.
A widow by then, Polly and her late husband had built the one-room log cabin themselves. Its most prominent feature was a massive fieldstone fireplace, used for both heating and cooking, that took up one whole wall of the cabin. Now, both Polly and her spouse chewed tobacco. In those days, cured and pressed tobacco meant for chewing came in plugs about the size and shape of a deck of cards. The “chaws” were neither packaged nor wrapped. Brands were distinguished one from another by small tin emblems with prongs on the back, one emblem per plug. The Red Apple emblem was actually shaped like an apple, Red Dog’s like a greyhound.
Polly and her husband favored a brand called Red Jay. Its emblem, scarlet with black lettering, was, not surprising, in the shape of a jaybird. Well, Polly, for whatever reason, had taken those emblems and stuck them
one by one into the mud chinks between the stones. Over the years -- and she lived to be ninety-one, which allowed for considerable chawing -- literally hundreds of shiny little red tin jaybirds were embedded in the wall.
The overall effect, as my father described it, would have been beyond kitsch and into the realm of the genuinely aesthetic. Here in regular lines, there in purely arbitrary arrangements, the emblems in combination would have generated a kind of optical chatter, a visual din both restful and jarring. Repetition would have reduced concentration on the individual unit (the miniature Red Jay icon) and increased apprehension of the display as a whole, a kind of three-dimensional wallpaper quite likely as powerful as it was comic and strange.
Was Polly’s intent wholly decorative? Was it to create a nostalgic record of those countless hours of chawing? Or was her wall a celebration of the pleasure chawing afforded her in a hardscrabble life whose pleasures would have been scarce and lean? In any case, when I envision that fireplace it is difficult not to think of Andy Warhol’s Two Hundred Campbell’s Soup Cans or Green Coca-Cola Bottles, paintings that caused such a stir in the art world in 1962. I’m proud that the blood of Polly Elrod runs in my veins. And I like to fancy that the red corpuscles in that blood resemble little tin jays.
My sister Rena never heard about her great-grandmother’s Pop Art masterpiece. For that matter, it’s doubtful if she ever heard the legend of the Cherokee princess, although she surely would have loved its happy ending. Rena was a sweet, sunny, towheaded child, whose life revolved mainly around her family of dolls.
It was a lovely May day two months before my seventh birthday when Rena, age four, was taken to Blowing Rock’s new clinic to have her tonsils removed. “She’ll be home in a day or so,” my mother assured me. Rena never came home -- except in a pretty little coffin decorated with cherubs, lined in white satin. She’d been administered an overdose of ether.