A 10th-anniversary confession
by Jack Neely
As unlikely, and alarming, as it may seem, I've been writing this column for Metro Pulse for 10 years this week. Actually, it wasn't a regular thing until about a year later—but the first "Secret History," a 600-word goof about the Sevier-Jackson near-duel, got published in May, 1992. The lead sentence was, "Everybody knows Andrew Jackson was a badass."
I think now's the time to get something off my chest. I'm not what people say I am.
I know they don't mean anything by it. But nearly every time I walk anywhere within spitting distance of a podium—heck, nearly every time somebody introduces me to anybody—I hear them call me, "Knoxville's unofficial historian."
Actually, sometimes they say, "Knoxville's official historian." I can only guess about how annoying that must be to Knoxville's official historian. I know him, by the way. We're on friendly terms, but I'm probably not someone he would want in his house.
What I'm trying to say is that I am not Knoxville's historian, unofficial or official either one. A historian has, by definition, either a graduate degree or gout.
I majored in American history in college, but I'd rather the SEC didn't look at my transcript. I never took a single class in regional history, anyway. I'm not, properly, a historian at all. I'm a reporter who exploits historians. Their job is much more difficult than mine.
Historians are in the business of preserving, organizing, and analyzing documents and artifacts. More than once a month,
people under the impression that I'm a "historian" send me a query about how best to preserve something: newspapers, photographs, tape recordings, quilts. Sometimes they even send me the object they want to preserve.
I rarely have the heart to tell them that I've never successfully preserved anything in my life except, once, a string of cayenne peppers, and I think that was dumb luck. I'm the guy who left his own passport in the basement until it was a moldy glob of official blue goo.
And historians tend to organize things. Some people who buy my books have been dismayed that they don't have indexes, and I usually tell them I just didn't have room. I meant to, but the last few pages where the index is supposed to go already had stories on them. But the truth is, the whole concept of indexing is beyond me.
Some historians have libraries. Most of them, it's safe to say, have their own filing cabinet or desk. Not me. I don't have a history library. I don't even have my own history nook. At my house, most of the rooms are covered with a graying layer of unpaid bills, dog hair, and middle-school homework.
My desk on the third floor of the Arnstein isn't much more historian-like than my house. Not organized in any linear fashion, it's a chaos of unread novels, census data, unrecycled Coke cans, old copies of the Oxford American, an almost intact 1996 World Almanac—and a few history books I usually can't find. It looks like an amusement park for gerbils. For all I know, maybe it is. I do keep a Minié ball in my paper-clip tray. That's historical, but it doesn't make me a historian.
My Rolodex does have a few local-history sources in it. But it's still mostly full of names of canny literary agents, publishers, and desperate freelance writers and cartoonists I dealt with at Whittle Communications in the 1980s. I've never had the guts to clean it out. The people on these cards are mostly tough New Yorkers, and they're not budging. As I flip their cards, I can hear them say, "Get offa me."
Jane and Michael Stern, the food critics. Peter Matthiessen, Aaron Neville, Andrei Codrescu, and Roy Blount, Jr., who all wrote stuff for me at one time or another. Dr. Joyce Brothers, of course. Ted Kennedy's in there, I don't remember why. Calvin Trillin, likewise, and someone by the name of Elvis Presley, Jr. I don't remember ever talking to them.
Some of the people in my Rolodex are stone dead. Edward Gorey, the great melancholy illustrator, whom I interviewed once. Peter Taylor, one of my favorite writers. Isaac Asimov is in there. He called me up, once, and I called him back. Vincent Price is in there. I spoke to him once, via his butler. Jack Henry Abbott, the bestselling novelist/ convicted murderer. I can't weed them out, somehow. Just because they're dead. I wouldn't want somebody to do it to me.
Anyway, all my local history sources are mixed in there in approximate alphabetical order, and sometimes among all the others, they're hard to find.
I rely very heavily on the Knox County public libraries, especially the McClung Collection—which employs actual historians—to do my preserving and organizing for me.
Moreover, there are huge gaps in my personal knowledge of Knoxville history, gaps which are dismayingly evident to any old-timer I meet.
You know Bud Mabry, don't you? they say. And Smiley Coykendahl? They expect me to respond with some ribald story, and I just don't have one. I grew up in Knoxville, but I didn't get out much. The names they mention sound familiar to me, because I've heard some tales, though I can never remember them well. When people tell those stories, I smile knowingly but I usually don't know who the hell they're talking about.
Though I'm no historian, I do like a good story, and I prefer the true ones. And most of the best true stories ever told are about people who are dead. I'm not the sort of guy who'd hold that against somebody.
May 23, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 21
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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