Crapalachia: A Biography of Place Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  A SHORT HISTORY OF THE McCLANAHAN FAMILY

  BUT STOP!

  A STORY ABOUT RUBY THAT WILL SHED LIGHT ON HER CHARACTER

  A SECOND STORY ABOUT RUBY THAT WILL SHED LIGHT ON HER CHARACTER

  THE FIRST CHAPTER

  THE NEXT NIGHT

  GRAVEYARDS

  TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK

  CHECKERS

  THE STORY OF AUNT MARY

  RHONDA

  WHAT HAPPENED?

  A STORY ABOUT RUBY TAKING STUFF

  YOU CAN’T PUT YOUR ARMS AROUND A RECIPE

  SO

  THE SECOND PART

  BILL

  THE STORY OF THE GREENBRIER GHOST

  AND THEN THE NEXT NIGHT

  MESSING WITH BILL

  SO I WENT TO SEE GRANDMA

  SO NOW A REMINDER ABOUT THE THEME OF THIS BOOK AND ALL BOOKS

  CRAZY FUCKERS I KNEW

  LEE BROWN

  OF COURSE

  SO I WENT TO SEE RUBY AGAIN

  RUBY’S END

  WHO KNOWS?

  SO THE NEXT DAY

  BILL IN LOVE

  JANETTE

  FREEDOM?

  JANETTE PART 2

  THIS LIST BEGINS…

  THE BREAK IN

  I WENT BACK

  SO I WENT AWAY

  A SHORT HISTORY OF CRAPALACHIA PT 3

  SO I FAILED

  APPENDIX AND NOTES

  Also published by TWO DOLLAR RADIO

  Copyright Page

  For Sarah

  “Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.”

  —Robert Penn Warren

  A SHORT HISTORY OF THE McCLANAHAN FAMILY

  There were 13 of them. The children had names that ended in Y sounds. That night I couldn’t sleep so I got out Grandma’s picture books and I learned about my blood and the names that ended in Y sounds. There was Betty and there was Annie and there was Stirley and there was Stanley and there was Leslie and there was Gary and there was Larry and there was Terry.

  Ruby said: “I like names that end in Y.”

  They all grew up in Danese, WV, eating blackberries for breakfast and eating blackberries for lunch and watching the snow come beneath the door in the wintertime. Holy shit it’s cold.

  There was my Uncle Stanley who I never heard say anything except “sheeeeeeeeeeeeet” and who I saw at the hospital one night talking to this other guy about how the state of West Virginia was making people wear a helmet now if they rode a 4-wheeler. He was all pissed off about it and told the guy: “I mean they’re gonna let them bunch of queers get married now, and I can’t even ride my 4-wheeler without a helmet on.”

  I flipped the page of the picture book and there was my Aunt Betty. She came over one day and sat at our table and told us this story about Elgie. She didn’t hold back. She told us the story about how he was trying to get his pension from the mines. But before he got it, he had to fight for a couple of months. He finally got a letter that went… “Dear Mr. McClanahan, we regret to inform you that we’re unable to approve you at this time. Please send your response within seven days and we’ll schedule another hearing.”

  Elgie didn’t even say anything.

  He just took it down to the outhouse and wiped his ass with it. Then he put it back into the envelope, sealed it up, and sent it back. My Aunt Betty was talking like this was an acceptable thing to do. She was telling this story to her 4-, 5-, 6-year-old and 8-year-old nieces and nephews. This was an acceptable story to tell 8-year-old kids.

  We were learning.

  There was my Uncle Leslie who was tough as hell. How tough was he? That’s what I asked Grandma once. She told me too. She told me about how there was this guy called The Toughest Man in Fayette County and he was this ex-con and beat the hell out of any man who ever messed with him. Leslie and The Toughest Man in Fayette County got into it one day about something. And so Leslie kicked the fuck out of The Toughest Man in Fayette County. It was because The Toughest Man in Fayette County always used vulgar language in front of women.

  I asked Ruby, “Well how old was Leslie at the time?”

  Ruby was quiet and then she said, “Eleven.”

  There were cousins too. There was my Cousin Bonnie who had this little boy from this man named Ernie. And Ernie had been in jail and made his living cockfighting. And so I saw them down at Pizza Hut and I looked over at Ernie and he was holding little Paul in his arms and smacking him in the face. SMACK. SMACK. He was smacking him hard. Everybody in the Pizza Hut was horrified because there was little Paul and he wasn’t crying about it. He was laughing.

  He was laughing because he loved getting slapped in the face.

  BUT STOP!

  There is one thing you’ll never know about my Uncle Nathan. You’ll never know just how sweet he was. You’ll never know how alive he was.

  Then I looked at pictures of my uncles like Uncle G. My Uncle G. was always trying to kill himself, but something always went wrong. One time he was working in a factory up north and living on Lake Erie. He bought a boat and a shotgun and some shells and decided to go out on the boat on a Saturday morning and end his life. He said goodbye to all of his friends and he told his wife it was the end. He had enough guts now. He wanted people to know this time he was truly going to make it happen. So he cleaned the shotgun and went out in his boat. He shined the boat up the day before. He cranked the motor and went out into the middle of the lake. He sat and looked out over the shining water and thought about his life. He knew this was the end. He clicked off the safety, put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He was still alive.

  He cracked open the shotgun and he saw it wasn’t loaded. When he cleaned it earlier, he took out the shells. He left the shells on the bed. Shit.

  He took his boat back home and he knew things were different now. He never tried to take his life again.

  There were stories about little boys getting ear infections, and Ruby not having enough money to take them to the doctors. So they just twisted and turned and flipped and flopped in their sick beds crying for days until their eardrums popped poof and they eventually went deaf. What did you say?

  My dad was working at Kroger when he was 19 years old, and one day in a store meeting, the manager was saying the names of these guys who broke into the store and stole a bunch of shit. He said the name of one of the robbers: “Stanley McClanahan.”

  Then he asked my dad, not thinking. “Do you know him, Mack?”

  My dad said: “Yeah, he’s my brother.”

  So the room grew quiet and the manager later apologized to him.

  There was my Uncle Grover who suffered from depression and schizophrenia. And instead of taking him to the doctor they brought in a faith healer and had someone hold him down and tried exorcising his demons. This was the way it was done. DEMONS. There was a picture of Elgie’s family I found—all eleven of them lined up in a row and so I asked my grandma, “Well who’s that and who’s this?”

  She said—“That’s so and so and she killed herself.”

  Then I said, “Well who’s this and who’s that?”

  Ruby said, “Oh that’s so and so—she killed herself.”

  And out of the 11 children, 5 of them committed suicide.

  And so I asked, “Well what happened to Elgie’s father?”

  She said: “Oh one day he was rocking a baby in his lap and then he put the baby down and went out behind the Johnny h
ouse.” Then she whispered so Nathan couldn’t hear: “And then he shot himself.”

  I flipped through the picture book and I saw it all. Some of them stayed and had children and some of them went to other places. Some went north to places like Flint, Michigan, and Cleveland, Ohio, and worked in factories. And some worked for General Motors in Flint, Michigan, and some worked in steel mills in Cleveland, Ohio. And the girls went to Washington, DC, and worked as secretaries. And some stayed and became convicted felons, and one married a school teacher named Audrey Karen and had a baby named Scott. And some married wives from faraway places with different accents and had children with different accents too. And so they went to faraway places like San Francisco, California, and Washington, DC, and Richmond, VA. And New York City, NY. And they never saw one another and they did what everyone does, they started living the same old boring fucking story. It’s a story full of death and dying, living and life, tits and ass and balls and dicks and pussy. It’s an old, old, old story that always begins—they begat and they begat and they begat.

  Now a million crazy babies explode from our smiles and start running all over the world so wild and screaming, Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

  SHIT!

  A STORY ABOUT RUBY THAT WILL SHED LIGHT ON HER CHARACTER

  I didn’t want to see her after the operation, but she said I had to. Ruby had her gallstones removed the day before and now she was at home sitting up in bed with this plastic pill bottle beside her on the table. I walked slow and scared to her. I walked with a little-boy walk and she propped herself up on the bed. I moved sideways with a slow step and then another slow step and then another. Then she took her plastic pill bottle and shook it in my face. It rattled like a rattle except it was full of something strange.

  “What is it, Grandma?”

  She shook them again and said, “They’re my gallstones. All 21 of them. Doctor cut them out of me and let me take them home. He wouldn’t let me take home the biggest though. He said he wanted to keep it on his desk.”

  Then she shook the pill bottle in my face a rat a tat tat. She said, “I’m going to make a flower bed with them.”

  Then she handed me the pill bottle and told me to put them in the flower bed. “Don’t you eat them now, Todd.”

  I shook my head like she was crazy.

  Then I went over to the window and opened the pill bottle and I put the gallstones in the bottom of a flower pot. “Nothing is growing,” I told her. She told me they would. I didn’t believe her.

  The next day a flower was blooming.

  And now…

  A SECOND STORY ABOUT RUBY THAT WILL SHED LIGHT ON HER CHARACTER

  I don’t know who named AIDS cat AIDS cat, but Grandma always hated him. She always said, “You better stay away from them hogs,” but AIDS cat never listened. He was AIDS cat. He had big patches of hair missing and he was all bony and skinny and looking like he was going to die any minute.

  So one day we were outside feeding the hogs and she told AIDS to stay away from the hogs just like usual, but he wasn’t listening.

  Of course, AIDS cat used to go around and steal slop off the hogs. There was a knot hole in the slop bucket this big bad daddy hog used to eat out of. And so the big daddy hawg was standing at the trough eating the slop, and AIDS cat just kept sticking its head through the knot hole and eating some of that grub. AIDS cat did it once. And then he did it twice. Then he did it three times. He stuck his head through and scooped up some of the slop with a paw.

  “You better watch it,” Ruby warned him one last time.

  He did it again and looked at us with a greedy grin.

  So finally the big daddy hog had enough and reached up and bit AIDS cat’s head plumb off—gulp. The cat’s body fell back and jerked and jimmied and jerked some more, and the big daddy hog stood gobbling it on down. Ruby didn’t say anything. She kept feeding the hogs and the pigs and then we went and sat on the front porch and watched the hummingbirds hum around. It felt peaceful.

  So let us begin again then with the first chapter.

  THE FIRST CHAPTER

  I started to stay with Ruby and my Uncle Nathan when I was 14 years old.

  It was around this time that Ruby ruined my birthday when she got breast cancer. I was in the kitchen when Ruby told me. She just looked at me and started shouting, “Oh lordie.”

  Then she started going on about how the doctor at Beckley said she had breast cancer and was going to die if she didn’t have her breast removed.

  My Uncle Stanley came to see us that evening, and I told him Grandma had cancer and was dying.

  He just whispered “shit” beneath his breath and called the doctor up and it turned out she didn’t have breast cancer at all but a benign growth that could possibly be cancerous.

  The doctor said it could be treated with a cream.

  She wanted everybody to think she had breast cancer though.

  She started bothering the doctor so much over the next couple of months that he finally agreed to take her breast off as a preventative measure. She told him there was a history of it in our family. She was lying.

  My Uncle Stanley started chewing her ass.

  Ruby said: “Well all I know is I don’t want to end up dying from it.”

  And Stanley said: “Ah hell, Mother, you don’t have cancer from what I’ve heard. You just have a growth that at this moment is benign.”

  “Well he said he could take it off when I asked him. He said it’s a preventative measure.”

  My Uncle Stanley said “shit” again. “Of course he said he could take it off. He’s a damn surgeon. That’s what he does. Surgeons are the worst people on earth. If you tell him to cut something off of your body, then he can sure as hell arrange it for you.”

  The day after the surgery was over we waited outside the room in the ICU.

  The nurse brought out this jug of brown liquid they’d drained off of her, and then the nurse said we could go inside. So we all went in and gathered around Ruby’s bed. She smiled and grinned with all of these IVs pouring out of her arm.

  She pulled down her hospital gown and showed us how it looked all bandaged and stitched up and sunken. “It’s not easy being a sick, old woman,” she said.

  My Uncle Stanley shook his head some more and whispered “shit” beneath his breath.

  Then I looked at my grandma and she looked so lopsided to me. She looked so cut up and gone.

  But then she pointed over to the old woman who was in the bed beside her. It was an old woman who wasn’t saying anything but just staring up at the ceiling.

  Ruby started telling us all about her. “That poor woman just cries and cries all night.” Then Ruby said loud enough for the woman to hear it: “She doesn’t know it yet, but before they brought her in I heard the nurses talking. They said the poor thing is full of tumors, and the family hasn’t told her yet. They said she only has a couple more weeks to live.”

  My Aunt Mary said, “Shhhh,” trying to tell Ruby to lower her voice. Then the old woman who just moments before looked dead, opened her eyes wide with a look on her face like: “What the fuck? What did you say? I’m dying?”

  Of course, it shouldn’t have surprised us when we came back to visiting hours later on that evening and Ruby was trying to sell a quilt. She was still bandaged up and sitting in the bed talking on the telephone to this woman on the 4th floor. “Now if you want this quilt you better call your daughter to bring you the money. Now I know you can’t walk but you better find a way to get me the money. I’m in bed two.”

  But then some nurse came in and got all over her.

  “Now Mrs. McClanahan, you get off that phone and quit trying to sell your quilts. You’ve just had a breast taken off and you need to rest.”

  Then the nurse took the phone from her and put
it down.

  “We don’t allow people to come in here and solicit patients and we don’t expect you to solicit your fellow patients to buy your quilts.”

  So the nurse left the room and Ruby started showing us the cards people had sent her.

  She showed us a card from Mae and a card from Geneva that said, “Get Well Soon.” There was a card from Leslie and Bernice and some flowers from Stirley and Brenda.