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Ten Thousand Cigarettes
by Rachel E. Pollock
Vatican Pizza and the China King. Ella Guru’s, Mercury Theatre, and the Snakesnatch Lodge. She whispered those names to me through the painted lips of sinners and scenesters, all us hillbilly trash turned Old City dance-rats with our faked college IDs and our cosmopolitan bisexual airs. I learned them like a litany; they made me feel grounded in unfamiliar territory. She gasped out the rumors of a thousand and one Knoxville nights and I listened rapt, eating them like greasy breakfasts, sopping up the details with a rind of memory and forgetting that I’d wanted to cut myself out of her like a tumor, run away.
It worked for a time, her stories, though by the time twenty-two rolled around I drove my old fifth-hand car through the winding hills of her outskirts, the Throwing Muses blaring from my pawnshop stereo, and I swore to God I’d get the hell out of Dodge, whatever it took. I’d be the one that made it somewhere big, somewhere North, somewhere far away from the blue mountains crouched beneath the grey skies of East Tennessee. I’d just keep on driving ’til the gas ran out as long as it got me somewheres way away out of Knoxville, “anyplace better than this.” I’d escape.
See, then, I lived in the hacked-up-Victorian ghetto of Fort Sanders, with an abandoned crackhouse on one side and a seedy apartment complex of former World’s Fair hotel rooms on the other. It was a short walk across steep streets on root-split sidewalks to any number of friends’ similarly decayed homes; we spent our summers on the porch sprawled on a previous tenant’s couch, drinking cans of Black Label and bitching about how it weren’t the heat but the humidity. We enjoyed the moneyed poverty of collegiate life, barely making rent and living off box-pasta while simultaneously blowing wads of cash on hooch and weed and dozens of CDs. We had friends who were homeless and others who worked factory jobs or pumped third-shift gas and that made us think we were plugged into a vast range of human experience–we were pert-near full of six shades of shit. The guys dyed their hair with Kool-Aid and wore their fathers’ combat boots; the girls elegantly sported second-hand cocktail dresses from the Blind Thrift, tiny vintage hats with voluminous black net veils, and carried clunky old-lady purses. We eschewed country music and the shining lights of mall stores and lobbed our disgust at the “rednecks” and Vol fans. This is what made us all individuals. I went out six nights a week to shitholes filled with men who wore lipstick and women who made out with each other after three drinks. I saw a bunch of bands with names like the Barnyard Martyrs and the Viceroys and watched drag queens throw french fries at punk kids at the all-night diner. I got laid a lot, tried a few drugs, had my heart broken about a hundred times, and smoked around ten thousand cigarettes.
Stumbling drunk through Market Square, puking delicately into the fountain, I saw reflected there a me I wished I could be–a woman making her way in a bigger city grey with concrete and buildings poked like angry birdfingers at the sun. This me was a woman making art, making fame, making money, chopping the rustle of an accent from the underbrush of her speech, burying her loamy Tennessee heritage in a grave of asphalt sticky with city heat. Then that strange old delusion of a cockeyed urban-fantasy wavers, a heave and splash, and ripples doppler it into fragments.
I don’t know what drew me to the sleazy fag-bars and dark dervish dance clubs of what morbidly-fascinated News-Sentinel reporters might’ve called “the sordid underbelly” of Knoxville. I wasn’t ignored or beaten or sexually abused as a child. I wasn’t freaked out by the dawn of a taboo sexuality. I didn’t grow up friendless, ostracized by “normal” schoolmates, nor was I overly popular and aching to rebel. I didn’t start drinking in grade school, wasn’t an acid casualty by fifteen, never skipped classes, dropped out, ran away from home. My youth was spent in a clichÉ of double dates and football games and dreamy prom nights that might well have sprung fully-formed from the pages of Seventeen magazine. Perhaps it was a novitiate inept acknowledgement of whatever near-ominous creative hole of the soul demands filling with art. Or perhaps it was the lure of the Jaded Road, a then-unidentifiable need to acquire what passed for worldly wear in the limited isolation of a Smoky Mountain college town. Maybe it was nothing more than the desire to dress outlandishly and dance until daylight.
I look back through a film of years, fumble with a battered shoebox marked “K-Vile,” and it’s like a picturebook torn and crumpled. There’s a young me with a wing of blonde hair and a redheaded gawker in tow, stumbling up a kudzu-strangled hill to watch the fireworks over the river. And there I am again, sneaking through the white circus of the fairpark to meet a hard-eyed, softspoken boy with a scar on his lip, to fuck in the shadow of the Candy Factory. I’m picking my roommate up from the plasma center–“He’ll get gone quicker tonight,” I think as he practically falls into the car, forty dollars clutched in his fist. I’m painting my name on an overpass. I’m sledding down 12th Street on a cardboard box. I’m visiting my best friend up at the jailhouse. I’m growing up. I’m slipping away.
Flip to the next snapshot: I’m at an art opening on Gay Street, for some gallery that’s cropped up in the two years since I left for Chicago. I live in a big grey city full of coldhearted assholes and trains that run all night long and I think it’s fucking great. I love all the garbage in the streets and the waitresses who don’t bother to make small talk and the pop-pop of gunfire from two neighborhoods over at night. I don’t think I miss “home” at all. Yet, my mother is ill, so I’m back in Tennessee for a while. I’ve looked at all the boring paintings at least twice and still can’t come up with anything flattering to say to the hot but talentless artist holding court in the far corner of the room, when I run into an old flame. We quickly discover there’s nothing between us now more substantial than a champagne fountain full of red wine, yet it is this simple lure of endless free booze that keeps us grasping for conversation. Within minutes it’s clear that he is content to dominate our smalltalk by crowing over former freaks-about-town.
“Kee Kee? He moved out to Cally-fornia, you know, and nobody’s heard of him since. He even changed his name. He’ll be back some day, though, you’ll see. You all will.” My vision goes redder than the quart of cheap wine I’ve just knocked back. I tell him he’s so full of shit his eyes are brown and stagger away. Fade to black.
Knoxville has always taken the form of a woman in my mind–rawboned-pretty, her jaw set with determination, she walks bravely alone in the dark in her carefully-repaired second-hand dress. One could almost believe she’s a city creature ’til she gets drunk enough that a drawl slips out. Hey lady? S’cuse me, ma’am? I’ve finally got something I want to say to her but she’s just a postcard now so I’m left talking to ink and pulp.
I miss you, you know? I think about it presently, a decade off, and the nights seemed blacker then, but brighter. Tennessee valley nights, your nights. You’re a pastiche, a collage, the tarpapered wall of the little shack a piece of my past sleeps in. You loved me so you let me go, and only in the going did I realize that I loved you, too. And I think on if it might be too late for us now, or if I’ll come back to you, and I wonder if your skies are full of as many stars as I recall. And I wonder if I’m a comet, off on a blazing careening path around the galaxy, zooming out and wheeling and eventually, will you pull me back into your tender-rough embrace and will it even feel like home?
Here’s a scene: Winter, 1993. There’s a foot of snow on the ground and nobody at Public Works has entertained even a half-assed idea of plowing the Fort. We’re snowbound. At this time, I’m living in a $150 two-room hunkerdown, one of six apartments in a two-story firetrap. This Forest Avenue dream-home features a huge boarded-up fireplace and useless yet exorbitant electric baseboard heaters. I sleep in the top berth of a pair of bunkbeds owned by a flamboyant homo named Ritchie and for now, my friend Epiphany from two blocks up the way is crashing on our couch with her cat Warhol because at least we got heat, period. Hers had been broken for days when the snow hit, and the rental company still ain’t answering the phone. (Bastards.) We’re getting stir-crazy.
The three of us put on every crazy piece of clothing in the house–skirts over shorts over pants over leggings, sweaters over hoodies over t-shirts over longjohns. We’re each wearing more scarves than Salome. We clump the three blocks to the Carousel, Knoxville’s oldest den of iniquity. I tell them how it’s been around for so long, my own mother knew gay guys who cruised there when she was in school. We get to the slippery slope that leads down to the club’s basement entrance and there’s a bucket-brigade of high-voiced but burly bouncers, gallantly handing down teetery-shod trannies and delicate scream-queens. Epiphany and I join the service-line but Ritchie scoffs and slides down the incline like a professional bobsledder. We all shell out for beer bust and a drag show, we drink ’til we’re so far gone we’re practically back again, then we crawl slowly home single-file through almost-virgin banks of snow. We form a chain-gang along the length of one of Ritchie’s scarves for our attempt at scaling the icy peak of 13th Street–he’s going to play Sherpa, being as how his shoes have the most traction. When we get home, we hold each other’s heads up while we puke. We keep each other warm. We display an arcane sort of care.
Trying to capture exactly what the point is here is like trying to get a good grip on a fistful of smoke. How do you describe smudged innocence, newborn adulthood, the novelty of grapples in the dark, a first fistfight, a first funeral, half-forgotten? How do you scrabble down under all the dirt and gravel of a decade spent knockabout in seas of cold faces and waves of manic hive activity? Can you still unearth the seed after the plant’s grown? How do you reach past ten years, down a thousand miles of highway, back to those first ten thousand cigarettes, to each breakup and bar brawl and betrayal that scratched its yellowed dear-diary scrawl across the pristine pages of your fingers, lips, throat, soul? If you breathe on the ember will it keep burning, or will it crumble to ash?
I struggle with these, my deformative years, a time which nostalgia has cast in the flattering light of reeling twilight delirium and bonds between friends forged strong, desperation and loyalty and a yearning for knowledge of the world beyond that scrappy little hill-town shivering in its valley. When I force these memories out into the careening deadly path of reality’s highbeams, I see us for what we really were–a bunch of stupid alcoholic misfits clinging to one another desperately before the sneer of a culture that both spawned us and rejected us. (Or perhaps we rejected it first. Does it matter?) Down we felt as up we grew, dancing our didn’ts and drinking our dids.
Perhaps I should be more ashamed of those years, perhaps I ought now consider them misspent. Yet I do not. They lend a strange and sodden richness to the taste of the past.
I live in Boston these days, and when people up here catch a remnant of that mountain lilt in my speech, they ask questions carefully phrased in yankee-liberal: “Where’s your accent from?” Of course, when I mention Knoxville, they usually make the pop-culture leap, Tarantino’s pocketwatch jammed up Christopher Walken’s ass or Bart Simpson’s class trip to the Sunsphere, all those folks rotting out at the Body Farm. On rare occasions, they hum a few bars of the old murder ballad. “I met a little girl in Knoxville, a town we all know well.” I smile. Change the subject.
They don’t know better. They don’t know about flying down Papermill Road in a jacked-up Nova with all the windows down, screaming along with Mötley Crüe and not a smidgen of irony in sight. The sun sinking down behind the hills huddled round, low-lying fog mingling with the factory smoke amidst the Gordian tangle of interstate onramps and mutant cloverleafs. Freight trains cutting through the back end of the Fort, rattling along the far side of the college campus, 2am night-trains I dreamed of jumping hobo-style, riding them to wherever the dawn brought me.
Funny I spent so much of my time in Knoxville dreaming of leaving it behind, and now that I’m gone I grasp greedily at the thinly singing strings of anything that brings it back. Any old murder ballad will do: “She walks these hills in a long black veil.” In fact, there doesn’t need to be murder involved; I put oldtime and bluegrass on my office stereo and jig around when no one is watching. I devour books like Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer and Sharyn McCrumb’s Ballad novels. I cultivate a taste for small-batch bourbon. I cobble together weird quilts of lyrics and literature to remind myself where I came from. I’m almost to the point where I’m proud.
Here’s a picture to take with you: a Boston springtime in the early-aughts, evening. I sit on the rickety front porch of a seaboard three-flat, sipping my Jim Beam, neat, from a chipped coffeemug. There aren’t any lightning bugs, or crepe myrtle in bloom, or cicada lullabies sawing the sun from the sky. Instead I can hear streetcars and taxi horns, and beneath the noise of the city, the ocean stroking the shoreline to sleep. A seagull draws a lazy infinity in the darkening twilight. I wave at my neighbor but I don’t ask him up for a drink; we are content with the distant familiarity of our acquaintance. Instead, I breathe in the sea-salt air and exhale smoke from my ten-thousandth New England cigarette, and I wonder about this idea of coming to peace with who you are, as an East Tennessean, a displaced Appalachian, perhaps as a once-and-future Knoxvillian. As a hillbilly, a hick, country trash in a city costume. I suspect there’s no peace at which to arrive, in the end. Acceptance, a rough and gentle balance at best.
I teeter, arms outstretched, ready for the embrace.
November 24, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 48
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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