RUNNIN THE ROADS WITH THE PRUITT BOYS

The party I told you about yesterday went on all night. Bill came back from town and his brother Don heard the banjo and saw Leo's car and Bill's car, he came in. As all-night parties go, this one drifted down to nothing when everybody ran out of energy and attention. All went back to where they came from and we planned to meet later at Mahogany Rock Overlook on the parkway. We had a cooler of beer and took up on a park table with benches, sitting looking out over the landscape, talking and laughing. A park ranger dropped by and told us we can't drink beer on the parkway. He was not unfriendly. We went to our cars and left. Bill and Don's brother Van was driving them and I followed in Pat's yellow Volkswagen bug. Van tried to outrun me on a winding gravel road, but I stayed with him. Eventually, we ended up at Margie's trailer decorated in "Spanish modern," with orange shag. We hung about there trying to get the party spirit back, but it was over. Pat and I returned to the house and carried on. Monday, working with Don, Bill was gone. Bill and Margie and Leo had left in Margie's car Monday morning. Leo had a trial coming up Tuesday for beating up his girlfriend, whose house he took Margie to after girlfriend left with her kids to stay with her parents until after his trial. Tuesday I heard from Don that Leo smacked Margie in a McDonald's parking lot in Bluefield, West Virginia. Margie threw all his clothes out of the car and she left, taking Bill with her. Leo found his way back and went to see girlfriend at her parents' house. She took him in and hid him from the deputies that were looking for him over skipping the trial. She dropped charges and they returned to her house together.

 

 

The story from there went that Margie and Bill drove to South Dakota where a man from here had a fairly large ranch. He gave them work and they stayed there awhile making some money and returned after a few months. Bill told me that the guys out there asked him how he drove drunk on winding mountain roads, because he drove drunk all the time. He said if the mountain roads weren't so crooked he couldn't stay on em. He didn't stay on mountain roads all that well. Riding around the county with him, he'd point at an outcropping of rock by the side of the road and say that's where he broke his collarbone and a leg. Another place he'd point and say that's where he broke his ribs and both arms. Just a year or two before I knew him he'd bought a brand new Ford and totaled it before he made it home. Drunk, Bill did a classic stagger, crossing his legs to keep balance, wobbling this way and that like a top slowing down. One night he left here late and walked back to old man Tom's house about a third of a mile up the road. I saw him take off walking, didn't believe he'd make it. I offered to drive him. No, he'd be all right. He made it. I don't know how long it took. I worked with Bill and Don all that summer and fall up to winter. They were my teachers. My first year I ran the roads with them on weekends and worked with them all week, putting up hay twice in the summer, cutting firewood for four houses, two of which burned it like it was for pretty in fireplaces where the heat went up the chimney, twice as much as the two that used wood-burning stoves where you have some control over the fire with dampers to control the blaze. It was in this time that a churchist man turned his back to me for knowing the Pruitt boys. In that moment I said to myself, Anybody too good for a Pruitt is too good for me. I adopted this maxim as a rule of thumb to live by in my new life. It has served me very well. It keeps me away from the pretentious.

 

 

I knew they were the bottom of the social spectrum. I thanked God for landing my parachute among people entirely devoid of pretensions. I had been something of a social climber in my own way theretofore, which really amounted to ego with no training. I took the "Pruitt boys" for a gift from God to bring me down out of that mind. I wanted to start "where all ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart." (WB Yeats, Among School Children)  I had a way of overdoing it with the liquor in the city, not so much getting stupid, but steadily and about all the time, more than my denial realized. My parachute landed me among guys I drank with all weekend, drank more than I did in the city. I thought, What's the deal? I believed I was following God's guidance, and he put me down among a bunch of guys that could drink me under the table like I'd never seen before. From where I came from, I thought I could hold it well. On the Friday after the first week of working with Bill, he showed up in my driveway after he'd been to town to cash his check. He had a bottle of Four Roses, some 7up and his brother Van in the passenger seat. He offered me a drink out of the bottle. I had to show him I could drink it straight, how I preferred it anyway, wishing he'd bought something that at least tastes good. Taste had nothing to do with it. Alcohol was the only consideration. It tickled him when he saw I could take it from the bottle. They got out of the car and we sat on the ground under a dogwood tree, taking turns with the bottle and laughing. By the time we finished the bottle, I was on my back, had to lean my head to the side and puke. They thought I was hilarious. I was in place. Bill wanted to go back to town for more liquor. His brother Van went with him. I was in the same place on my back when they returned. They sat on the ground and finished the second bottle while I lay on my back awed by how Bill and Van could take it. They'd offer me a drink from time to time and laugh when I declined.

 

 

After that weekend it became customary for me to ride with them Friday night and Saturday night, floating around in Van's Dodge with posi-trac rear end he called The Goat. Not many years later he drove the goat through a light-pole twelve feet above the ground, split it in two. He woke up on the hood unhurt. His young nephew who was 12 or 13 was with him. He, too, landed on the hood unhurt. The law came down on Van hard. Not long before that a highway patrolman set off after him and Van tried to outrun him, thought he'd take a dirt road and lose him. He turned onto a dirt road that dead-ended at a barn, flashing light on his tail. The wreck with the kid in the car cost Van his driver's license for life. They always had guns in the car riding the roads. We'd come up on a good secluded spot, like the Nile on the New River, a redneck party place on the river in those years where there is always the remains of a campfire people sat around drinking beer, throwing the bottles and cans in the river. The party place is grown up now in ironweed. The younger generations since that time have drifted away from drinking beer at the river to reefer and other places like the bowling alley. That generation is gone now, too. It's cell phones and crystal meth culture now. We'd take out a .22 rifle, throw beer cans or bottles into the river and shoot at them bobbing along the current. My inner ecologist cringed, but I kept it to myself. This was their world, not mine. They thought it was funny that I kept my empty beer cans in a bag on the floorboard at my feet. They threw them out the windows. I could not make myself do it for any degree of acceptance. It didn't matter. Poor people were walking the roadsides in that time with bags picking up aluminum cans to sell for some groceries. Anti-littering laws have put these people out of business. I'd get with God and ask what's going on. I was drinking more than I ever had before, when part of my motivation coming to the mountains was to lay off, at least appreciably. The feeling I'd get back was, no-problem, don't worry about it. Time passed and within a year interest in alcohol as something to indulge in fell away. Just drifted off. The Pruitt boys were my teachers. Drinking with them was part of my learning. After a year, Bill went to Florida and Don moved to town and our party weekends were over. Bill, Don, Van, Leo and Margie are all dead now. Every one of them has an honored place in my heart.   

 

caterpillar

photos by tj worthington

 

 

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RUNNING THE MOUNTAIN ROADS WITH THE PRUITT BOYS

christo

It's Fourthajuly again. Lotsa parties at the river in the rain. The people who like to party on the river in this part of the mountains will be there, whatever the weather. They're people who understand that the weather is not constant blue sky. It rains. It even storms. This is the earth we live on. The people partying at the river go there because they understand this is the earth we live on and it's time to party hearty. Guitars, banjos, beer, white liquor, what-have-you, all kinds of motorcycles; whole lotta party goin on. The South's gonna do it again! It's all good people taking a break, time off from work, get together with a bunch of friends and holler, Hail Yeah! Confederate flag on tshirts, bandanas, hats, pickups. To an insider, it's mostly people you know, many of them you have memories with, the people of your life. Also, to an insider, each has the backup of the whole if threatened by an outsider, or maybe life threatened by an insider too drunk to know what he's doing, or something. An outsider would only see rednecks to fear, the unpredictable unknown. It's a legitimate concern after a certain level of drinking, but only if the outsider is a provoking personality. Fights happen. Everybody there knows fights happen. Get a bunch of roosters together in a chicken pen and fights happen. It's no big deal. It's what men do. We're raised to be warriors, but allowed no outlet in our everyday lives except sublimation by watching tv. Boys grow up fighting. In the working class, men continue to fight. They know it's therapeutic release, much like the primal thrill that runs through a man's entire nervous system hunting. The women hunt and fight, too. They know the thrill as well.

christo

Every year there is less and less river front to party on due to subdivisions. It aint what it used to be. Everything changes we tell ourselves. Acceptance is the only recourse we have, and it's so relaxing when we get there. A bend in the New River at the Nile had a rather large cleared place beside the road at the state line with Virginia. It's all covered up in ironweed now. A lot of stories came out of that party place. Like the boy that shot a girl in the leg, drunk, stoned, the whole deal, and his lawyer got him out of the charges by finding this spot on maps is different from survey to survey. It could not be determined for certain which state he was in, NC or Virginia. It didn't go to court. I spent quite a bit of time there with the Pruitt Boys in my first year in the mountains, talking with other people that go there to drink beer at a place by the river where it's quiet. They were my tour guides, friends and body guards the summer of 1977. We shot .22 rifles there. I was surprised at how good a shot I was at the start, attributed it to years of using a camera, holding it steady, squeezing the trigger gently. We'd throw a beer can out into the river and shoot at it until it sank, if that could be done before the current carried it out of range. Mostly, we didn't hit it, and even more mostly we didn't care. A chance to hear a gun go boom. Drink some beer, get a little high, stop at the liquor store, four of us in Van's old Dodge. He called it the Goat. It would go anywhere with a good posi-trac rear end. A few years later he drove it through a power pole 12 feet above the ground, went off a bank in a curve shit-faced drunk. I think of Van whenever I see the replacement pole out in the field from the road. He woke up on the hood of the car with his twelve year old nephew beside him on the hood. Neither one was hurt. Van lost his drivers license forever.

christo

They taught me an awful lot just by taking me around to drop in on different people they knew, go to the pool room and have a beer, play some pool, shoot the breeze with the others in there. I'm recalling a time in the pool room, a guy in his thirties whose name I don't remember, a drunk who drank himself to oblivion every time he started. This night in the pool room he was on the edge of the big O. Don Pruitt was a little bit anxious about the jukebox. One of them told me that if somebody played Amazing Grace on the jukebox, this drunk guy would start preaching. I was told that if somebody plays it, we're leaving. Don didn't like it. A drunk man preaching ran all over him. It was humiliating seeing the guy so out of control manipulated for a quarter and a laugh. Don wasn't one for church, nor church people, but he was a believer in his heart. It was too much disrespect all the way around for him to tolerate seeing. With two uncles and a great grandfather preachers, he got his church upbringing. He just rejected the people of the church because they wouldn't accept him. He didn't care about the people in the church and relatives talking about him living in sin drinking beer. One thing he knew, he wasn't a hypocrite. And he grew up knowing all of them. Eventually, somebody played Amazing Grace on the jukebox. The guy started getting wound up and Don said, We're leaving. We all went out the door in a hurry to keep up with him so he wouldn't drive off without us.

christo

A moment stays in my mind of a Sunday morning in the spring of my first year, been here about six or seven months through the winter. I wanted to experience a mountain church meeting. I picked one in Whitehead, won't say which, because it doesn't matter. Before the meeting I was standing outside talking with a couple of up in years men and another came up, How ye a-doin fellers? One of the men said, What was that shootin goin on up by your place yesterday, brother? Aw, it was them Pruitt boys. He looked at me, turned and walked away. My thought that moment, Anybody too good for a Pruitt is too good for me. I have lived by that all the years I've been in these mountains. I mean it, too. It has served me well. It keeps pretentious people out of my life. The Pruitts were not exactly high up on the social ladder. My maxim meant to me a vow I would never seek a height where I could look down on these people. The day before, we had been at a place on the back part of Waterfall Road, the Robert Frost path untaken. A flat place in the road they called "the flat" was a place trash was thrown down the bank above the 3rd waterfall. Years of household trash thrown down there. We found an old 45, circle in the center, label for a ring and black record itself for a ring. Woods all around as far as you could imagine. We fixed it to the front of a white Styrofoam plate somehow and used it for a target. All of us hit the center every time. It was too close to miss. We'd just been by the house of a friend of theirs who gave us a J wrapped in pink paper. We called it the pink rocket. It took us there, too. Hanging at the dump looking through trash, picking up something to shoot at, our empty beer cans targets too. Car doors open, radio playing Moe Bandy, Sammi Smith. Then it was off to the next whatever might happen.

christo

 

For me, they were people to be looked up to. I'd just come out of a lifetime of school into a car with three hard working, hard fighting, hard drinking, hard driving brothers who weren't particularly liked by everybody, but weren't afraid of anybody either. The whole county knew you take one on, you've got all three. They always had guns. We had good times and good laughs, laughing like kids, my dog Sadie on the back seat between me and Van or Bill, whoever was not driving, beer cans tossed out the windows when they ran dry. I couldn't do it. I put mine in a paper bag kept under the seat. They thought that was the dumbest thing they ever seen. I couldn't help it. The mountain scenery they were driving me through all over the county was awe inspiring to me. I couldn't trash it consciously, to be one of the guys. It was home to them. I had no issue with them doing whatever they did. I was the visitor. I felt like God landed my parachute among them to learn from them, them in particular. I was not here to tell them how they oughta be. I was here to learn. Like their uncle Tom Pruitt, they were my teachers without teaching. Any highway in the county, Bill would point at a rock sticking out from a stone bank and say, That's where I broke my collar bone and right arm. Another place a tree, That's where I broke my left leg, left arm and ribs. He was a terrible driver when he was drunk. Just before I arrived here, he'd bought a new Ford and totaled it before he made it home. Insurance took care of it. He seldom reached his destination til next day when he took off driving drunk. In a fight, it took knocking him out to stop him.

christo

I never wanted to be thought of as better than any one of the Pruitt boys. I may not drive cars through power poles and get beer bottles broken over my head, but it doesn't make me better than them. We drifted apart after awhile. Don moved into town. Van lived in Cherry Lane. Bill, who had been staying with Tom was off to North Dakota with Margie Walls. I'd see them every once in awhile over the years, not as much as I wanted to, not near as much as I wanted to. Our lives took us in different directions. A year of weekend school with three hillbillies of my generation, working with Bill and Don on the farm in the spring, summer and fall, I got my feet planted on the ground in my new mountain home. I had the beginnings of knowing where I am. They made good references later. When I'd meet new people I'd mention I knew the Pruitts and old man Tom. Everybody knew them. I didn't care what they thought of the Pruitt boys. I knew what they thought from different things I'd heard, but none of it made me ashamed of them. One time years later I was painting at the Nile and a man I didn't know came up to see what I was doing. He was a little suspicious of me and I was a little suspicious of him. We talked a bit. Turned out he knew everybody I knew, he was Harlan Andrews's first cousin, and by the time we'd finished talking we were friends.  

christo

 

 

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