Metro Pulse/Secret History/The Metamorphosis

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Reflections on crossing Second Creek, 20 years after

by Jack Neely

Back then I did a lot of walking late at night. I'd watch the PARK : BANK clock that I could see clearly across the valley of the old freight yards, and gauge my pace. It would report 11:47; 1:01; 2:24 as I walked across the neighborhood, by the bright hospital, behind the produce warehouses, through shadowy, noisy neighborhoods to the train tracks, and then make a big circle and walk back. I was discouraged with school, and dropped out for two quarters. Fort Sanders made failure easier to contemplate.

I got to know that neighborhood well, especially the eastern fringe where it turned from a decadent residential area into a decadent industrial area: the oddly small but elaborate houses along 11th Street, then covered with dead vines; the abandoned old brick factory and warehouse buildings and machine shops along 10th; off to the north, the dark, dead train station, its broken windows staring at the empty tracks; the rail yards beneath me when I hunched across the Clinch Avenue viaduct; the muddy creek. Sometimes, peering over the concrete banister on Clinch, I'd see a woman in a dress down there carrying a sack along the rails. I wondered what she was doing until I noticed she was picking up lumps of coal that had fallen off the coal trains.

I nearly moved down there once. On 10th near Clinch or Laurel there was one of those old-fashioned boarding-house deals where a sweet old lady lived downstairs and had three or four folks living upstairs. I think she was only asking about $50 a month, and that included meals. I was ready to sign, but thought I'd better have a look at the place first. It was more or less a third-floor attic room with a 45-degree ceiling, or, that is, it would if it were flat. It bowed down over the bed, as if it were full of water and about to burst. That didn't bother me quite as much as the fact that it smelled as if something of an impressive size had died in there, perhaps last Monday or Tuesday.

The lady didn't seem to notice, and smiled as if it were the Ritz-Carlton. I almost signed just to keep from hurting her feelings. I eventually found a much swankier place near 12th for $120, utilities, linoleum floors and rickety loft bed included, in the back of an aluminum-sided house, accessible by a wooden catwalk.

I got a job downtown, in the summer of 1980, working late-night shifts as assistant lackey at the newspaper, and crossed the Clinch viaduct every day. I watched as crews tore up some of those old train tracks. They demolished some industrial buildings, and even a few streets; 10th Street vanished altogether. Working even after midnight, the times when I was most likely to be leaning over the rail, they dug a deep trench, laying a huge pipe to contain a creek underground. Illuminated by bright lights, their work reminded me of lunar scenes directed by Kubrick. I somehow thought it was important to watch, and soak it in. I'm not sure I knew anything about what it was for. I didn't watch TV, and I rarely read the newspaper I worked for. It took these weird nocturnal scenes to get me curious about local politics.

Even my anarchist neighbors began to spread rumors about a World's Fair. It made some of them mad, and they tacked up posters that said World's Unfair, a slogan I think they wished were more clever than it was.

I watched from my catwalk as it materialized a block and a half away: big blue corrugated steel buildings in bright hues I hadn't seen since kindergarten; a bright-white rigid tent that even then people were calling Dolly's Bra; a white triangular building that looked like a high-tech doorstop. I did like the weird steel thing that went up in the middle, and watched it rise, expecting it to be something provocative and spectacular. When the top first bloomed into a steel-beam globe, it had an austere simplicity. Then, one day, somebody came along and covered the whole sphere with shiny yellow stuff. All the new stuff over there was looking like rubber teething toys for giants.

It didn't seem to have anything to do with my neighborhood, or my life. They fenced it all off and I was grateful for the fact, except that I couldn't walk downtown anymore except by the Western Avenue viaduct. I didn't understand the old brass plaque which identified it as Asylum Ave.

That was beginning to seem like my career path. I'd quit the newspaper job to finish school, but somehow, even though I'd finally squeezed out a degree in liberal arts with a concentration in 19th century foreign policy, I couldn't find a job in Knoxville. I had a line on a job as a truck dispatcher and didn't get it. The newspapers didn't have any further use for me, either. Irregularly I worked for Manpower, loading and unloading, mostly, cleaning up industrial sites, shoveling, hoisting, just so I could afford canned hash and $1.69 six-packs from Mr. Kagley, the old deaf man who ran the little beer store on Forest Ave.

I liked my life, all except the part about not knowing if I could swing it again next month. But the want ads all seemed to lead into the World's Fair vortex, and in early '82, I finally accepted the inevitable. I had my price, and it was the minimum wage.

By May, they'd played the same trick on me that they'd played the Second Creek valley. I wore a bright red polyester shirt and a rainbow-striped belt. I wore a nameplate with the flame logo on it. And for a long sunny summer, I bragged to strangers about the wonderful World's Fair.