OLD TIMES / NEW TIMES

jessica stockholder

I'm back from a couple hours with my friend Debi I've not seen in a few years. She's been through it and came out the other end. I've known Debi since she was sixteen, worked with her dad and her uncle on the farm putting up hay in the summers. Debi was a fire-haired hillbilly girl then, and now the fire has gone from her hair, but she's still a hillbilly and wouldn't be anything else. It's odd to see her aging. I see her taking on the look of about all her relatives past a certain age. I could have put several names to the face I saw this evening, all of them her cousins, aunts or uncles. She's a Pruitt and a Crouse by birth. Pruitts are special people to me. They are the first people I knew, the ones who taught me mountain ways and my way around. Debi is one of the last of the Pruitts I know, as the generations I have known are largely dead. The younger ones went to cities for work. She has become my thread that keeps me connected to her kin. And similarly, I am her thread to her relatives that are gone. I'd been in the hills about six months when I decided to check out a nearby church. I went a couple times. The third time, I was talking with two men out front before the meeting. One came over and one of the ones I was talking with asked him, "What was that shootin goin on up at your place yesterday?" Answer, "Aw, It was them Pruitt boys." He looked at me, turned and walked away. My thought at the moment: Anybody too good for a Pruitt is too good for me. I have carried this maxim the whole way along and it has served me well. The Pruitt boys were rowdy and I rode around with them on weekends. They were the best education I could have had for introduction to mountain culture. I worked with two of them during the week and on weekends we ran the back roads throwing beer cans out the car windows. I kept my empty cans in a paper bag on the floor. They thought that was funny. I could not toss a beer can out the window. It wasn't possible. Even if my mind wanted to do it, my arm would not allow it. A .22 rifle was always with us. Sometimes we shot at the cans I saved. Never went back to the church.

 

neil jenney

 

We did not talk about these people who have a place in my heart and a place in her heart too. They are initially our bond. For her, I'm a witness to the wonderful people they were. The Pruitts are one of the mountain families that has a reputation for being either preachers or drunks. Such families tend to have at least one bootlegger in their near past, like daddy, grandpa and greatgrandpa. Liquor makers tend to be drinkers and many of them drink all the time. Heavy drinkers tend to be terrible husbands and parents, keep dysfunctional households and raise dysfunctional kids. The boys aligned with daddy tend to be rowdy and the boys aligned with mama tend to make preachers who condemn drinking. This becomes a social dynamic. A couple of generations down the line, one will have kids that stay in trouble, and another will have kids that go to church. When I run through the names of the families known for preachers and drunks, they tend to come from bootleggers just a few generations back. Throw in good and evil and the judgment begins. It has nothing to do with good and evil except a belief system that allows only one or the other. We don't call it good and evil anymore. It is black and white now. I hear it called gray in between. It is colors in between. In pigment, all colors mixed together make black. In light, all colors make white. It is colors between black and white, not gray. Duality is the nature of this world of experience. Duality makes the colors. We meander in the color zone, not at the poles. On the earth, nobody lives at the north or south poles. We live between the poles. Who is to say a handful of brothers and buddies are evil because they like to free their minds of their frustrations periodically? And who is to say a preacher who looks down his nose at drunks is good? In the culture we have the divide, drinkers and non-drinkers. The drinkers are bad and the non-drinkers are good. I go with the company of the bad, because I have experienced the hypocrisy of the good.

 

ai wei wei

 

An old-time square-dance tune is playing in my head, Have a drink on me / Have a drink on me / Aw Lord / Have another drink on me. It's a funny song. One of the aspects of traveling my own path that I especially like is seeing how limiting either/or thinking can be, caught up in the poles, ignoring everything in between. A walk to the waterfalls for me is the whole trip there and the whole trip back, the falls the turn around point. I love being under a canopy of trees. In conversation with my old deceased preacher friend, Millard Pruitt, Debi's uncle, I said I can worship God the same in the  woods among trees as well as in the church. No you can't. I'm glad my mind is not locked down in yes and no, right and wrong, good and evil. I don't even think about good and bad anymore. I'm happy to note that kind of thinking is gone from my head. I find that I personally prefer the company of lovers of God, but they're only a part of the whole. I know and like some people whose names make about anybody around here shudder. One in particular comes to the front of my mind, whose name I'll not mention to protect the innocent. Everybody shudders when they hear her name. I don't. I like her. I'm not going to push her buttons or piss her off, which can have a way of being lethal. Pushing other people's buttons is not my style, so I'm in no danger around her. In fact, I feel safe around her. When she's not giving herself a bad name, she has a great sense of humor, and is a no bullshit kinda woman. I respect her. I respect everybody who has been to prison. I respect her for what she's been through and I respect her character. Where trust is concerned, I would trust her and not most others. Debi too. I'd trust Debi to the grave. I want to be somebody Debi can trust. If need ever arises, I pray that I have what it takes to be there for Debi. This is how I feel with the people I call my friends.

 

the chakras

 

A month or so ago, Debi had an experience with the Holy Spirit. She told me the experience and I believe her interpretation of it. It brought to mind a day I remember several years ago, a day when I was in the spirit from the moment I woke in the morning unto night. Memorable day. I listened to Debi's experience happy for her. She needed an upliftment. Like I say, she's been through it and came out the other end. This must have been the quasar at the other end of her interior black hole. She said she's happy for the first time in her life. I saw it. It was in everything about her, her movement, her attitude. She wasn't new in that it changed her away from being Debi, but took her closer to Debi. She had the misfortune of being born with an incredibly fast, retentive mind in a social situation that had no place for such a mind. She had to dumb herself way down. The dumbing down took her with it. She brings to mind a Van Halen song, "Ya know I been to the edge. There I stood and looked down." Debi would say, Amen, to that. She came home to take care of her mother unto dying, then made her way for a few years taking care of an old woman with dementia, the shit on the walls variety. Since the year 2000, if you don't have a job in Sparta, you're out. The mechanics are having a minor boom since fewer people are buying new cars. She has dental issues, Social Services issues, poverty issues. She's getting by without a car, which is mighty troublesome. She's at the bottom where poverty is concerned, yet in her heart she's the best she's ever been in her life. She has a good dog, got rid of a loser man, is losing weight by cutting out soft drinks. She's had her hard times and she's had her good times. I asked her what church she was going to. I was gladdened to hear she was not going to church. She has the real thing, I was thinking, don't spoil it. Live it, enjoy your new perspective. I don't like to advise, but took a moment when she was talking about different interpretations of the Bible, to say, The red letters is the only part that's important, the rest of it is a history book, don't worry about interpretations. If I could leave anything of value with her, I felt like that was the best value I had to offer at the beginning of her path. I allowed myself to say it because it arose spontaneously, flowed from the moment.          

 

 

sol lewitt

 

 

 

*

 

 

MOUNTAIN PHILOSOPHERS

black, red, white



I saw Lois Landreth for a few minutes today, widow of Basil Landreth, Sparta's barber before Kermit Pruitt. Basil was the first barber I went to here, and where I came from we performed loyalty to some degree, and I always went back to Basil until his mind went away and Basil went away. Every time I went to the barber shop, he'd bring up Tom Pruitt, who Basil knew was my neighbor and that I worked with Tom, thought a great deal of Tom. Every time, he told me he'd seen Tom come out of the liquor store carrying a bottle. I'd say, "Wild Turkey." He wasn't telling on Tom for sin, Basil drank too, about like Tom, when he felt like having a sip, rather he saw Tom and mentioned it. Something to talk about with somebody he didn't know very well. The barber shop was across the street from the liquor store and he saw everybody that went in and out. Basil played guitar and sometimes jams occurred in the barber shop, but I was still way too much in flatland mind and thought nothing of it.



Basil was one of the first people I knew in the county and/or Sparta. Mildred Torney was another of the first ones I became acquainted with, back in the first year when I only knew the Pruitt boys and old man Tom Pruitt. I became acquainted with a few people the Pruitt boys knew, whose names I'll save the embarrassment of appearing here, people who were not even on the first rung of the social ladder. People with their feet still on the ground. I took to them, liked them, enjoyed partying with them, except their limits were way out there beyond mine. Along about the time they were getting ready to start, I'm thinking I've done partied. I'd been working with Bill a week in early spring when he and Van showed up in Van's car. Bill handed me a bottle of Four Roses. I'd been borderline alcoholic when I moved to the mountains, intent on putting the drinking behind me, not as an absolute, but to cut way back. I saw this was the test, can city-boy drink? Hail yeah, I could drink. Sorry it was Four Roses instead of something that tasted a little less nasty, I bottomed-up, look out stomach, here it comes.



Bill handed me a bottle of 7up for chaser, but I'd never done anything like that, and declined. I always liked my liquor straight, whatever it was, unless it was gin. The Four Roses didn't leave a very good taste in my mouth, but the 7up would have made it worse. I passed this leg of the test. I could take it. They stepped out of the car and we sat in what might be called my front yard and consumed the bottle, talking like crazy. By the time the bottle was done, I was on my back, leaned my head to the side and puked, done. For them, it was time to head to town and get some more. Asked if I wanted to go along. I said I'd stick around and be here when they get back. I wasn't able to take anything from the second bottle. I'd had all I cared anything about. An empty, sensitive stomach that had rejected what I'd put into it didn't want any more Four Roses or anything with alcohol in it, not even beer. We went into the house when it turned dark. Don turned up and we jabbered while they drank the second bottle. Van drove Don home and Bill staggered up to Tom's house. I don't know how or when he made it, but he did. I failed the second leg of the test. That didn't change anything. It told them I was a puss, which they already knew.



The Pruitt boys, Tom and Basil were the people I knew the first year at Air Bellows. One thing I found ran through all of them, they were philosophers in the same way my grandmother Worthington was a philosopher, who passed her philosophical way of thinking to me. This was the first familiarity I found in the mountains, they thought like I thought, the way I picked up from my grandmother. In about the middle of the first year, I realized the reason behind so much being familiar in mountain culture was that I'd learned it from my grandmother. It was comfortable, it was home. She'd been dead about 7 or 8 years, and I wanted to tell her I live among people she would like. It wasn't until 30 years later I learned her mother and dad had moved to Jefferson County, Kansas, from eastern Kentucky, Pulaski County, a month or so before the end of the Civil War.



When I say they were philosophers, I don't mean they had PhDs in philosophy, read Kant and Wittgenstein for fun, or even heard of Plato. They knew about Jesus, the philosoph of philosophs. I mean they thought philosophically, and that doesn't mean denying you feel bad, like being philosophical about making a big mistake that set them back. They think about things, not necessarily "intelligent" things, but values, integrity, morality. In Basil's barber chair, I was getting a haircut by a philosopher in my way of seeing. All the evenings I listened to Tom talk, days working with Tom, I was listening to a philosopher. I met Tom's preacher brother, Millard, and he was a philosopher who dove all the way into the Bible as his philosophical text. He would say it was primarily spiritual, and it is, but it is also philosophical. Jesus quoted Socrates from a few hundred years before, when he said, Know thyself. I believe he meant it for its meaning first. His second meaning was to validate Socrates to his own followers as a philosoph worth paying attention to.



This way of thinking I call philosophical was refreshing to discover, especially as actually the foundation of the mountain way of thinking. I'd not known many people since my grandmother I had to leave at age 15 who thought that way. Didn't know it, but I was lonesome for it. When I found it all around me in the people of the mountains I fell in to home. I didn't have much in common with any of the mountain people where experience was concerned. I knew nothing about their culture and they knew nothing of the culture I came from, flatland culture, except for tv. I found at the start that I could connect with everyone I came to know in the philosopher aspect of their minds, their way of thinking that was also mine. This has always been the aspect of a mountain personality and mine where we connect. I have it to this day. I don't talk much about motors, guns and beer. When I'm with people who only talk on these subjects, we connect in that philosophical part of our minds and have a good time. They find somebody they can talk with about some of the things they think about. And I do too.



*

THEM PRUITT BOYS

When I arrived in these mountains, Tom Pruitt had his nephew Bill staying with him. Bill was at loose ends after a divorce. Sometimes he was at Toms, mostly not. Bill and I were the same age. His brother Don, 4 years older, lived in a small trailer up the road the opposite direction from Tom's and about the same distance. Don's wife worked at Hanes underwear factory in town. Don worked as work turned up. Sometimes he did farm work on the Willis farm and Stern farm for Tom, like putting up hay. He worked for Jr Maxwell off-bearing at the sawmill some.

The first two months, Nov and Dec, I stayed in the old farmhouse, the Caudill homeplace. Only heat source was the fireplace. All the heat went up the chimney. I didn't know enough about fireplaces to set it so the heat went into the room, but am here to tell it. It wasn't lethal. I lived on the floor in front of the fire. Had a couch pulled up close, where I sometimes slept at night. Mostly slept in the back bedroom added onto the house after Caudills had left, probably added by Leinbachs of Winston-Salem, who sold the place to Stern. It had an electric heater in there, seriously dangerous. First several days I was anxious as in anxiety. One morning I was washing dishes and somehow a teapot slipped from my hands and somehow hit the edge of the sink as I grabbed for it. It exploded into a shower of shrapnel that fell to the floor. Except one that dug into the underside of the wrist of my right hand. I'm not one to go to emergency rooms, but this called for it. The nurse's last name was Gray, and she was good to me, so genuine a human being I never forgot her.

It was a desperate time for me. I wanted to do everything at once. I wanted to know some people. I found right away in Sparta, nobody wants to know a fur'ner. Nobody wants to know anybody they don't already know. It's a very strange feeling to be in a place where nobody knows you, you don't know anybody, anyone you've met doesn't recognize you the second time they see you. At the laundromat I'd be stared at like I was a television. I'd speak to the one staring and there would be no change of expression, no recognition in the eyes the person had been spoken to, just blank like watching tv.

First time I drove to town to get some gas, Tom told me vehemently to go to the Wilco. I wondered why he was so vehement about it. It was the cheapest. It didn't have the convenience store that goes with it now, though now it is Hess, Wilco-Hess Corp. It was all gas pumps and an island in the middle for paying. I'd been a believer that city people were unfriendly, but country people were friendly. I went to the place about the size of a phone booth with a man inside, a little opening in the Plexiglas to hand the money through. The man put out his hand for it, didn't look at me, didn't speak, nothing. I put the money in the hand and it withdrew. I thought of one of those banks with the place to put a coin that activates a plastic hand that jumps up and snatches it.

I found Sparta to be aggressively the unfriendliest place I'd ever heard of. Next time I was in NYC I was astonished at how friendly everyone seemed. I recall making a white-haired Sparta society woman furious overhearing me talking with someone else, saying Sparta is the least friendly place I've ever seen. That was not exaggeration. To the last time I saw her, she gave me the same look she gave me then. Whenever I'd go someplace, like Charleston rather frequently the first few years, I was struck by how friendly everybody seemed. The man at the Wilco station came to symbolize all the rest for me here.

There was quite a number of years I hated it here. The worst was any time I'd have a conversation with somebody, they'd look right through me next time I saw them like I wasn't there. I started calling it the Sparta Look, the look that says: thought I saw something, guess I didn't. It's a look that looks right straight at you and sees nothing, and not even self-conscious about staring. The Sparta Look. There came a time I learned the Look and would give it to the people who'd done it to me. They hated it. Really hated it. Called me arrogant behind my back. What's a feller to do?

Bill and Don Pruitt were my first friends. Working with Bill we talked and got acquainted; he taught me how to sharpen a chainsaw and cut down a tree so it will fall where you went it to, important things, like he was enjoying being my teacher. Though Bill was a hillbilly and I was a city boy I felt there was no difference between Bill and me when it came right down to it. He was like cousins of mine, guys I knew at school, except he listened to country and I listened to rock & roll. Bill lived his life a bit more head-on than I did. I admired it in him, though it cost him a hell of a lot in liability insurance and broken bones. Like me, Bill was a little guy in a big guy's world, and neither one of us wanted to be big. I couldn't talk about American writing and 20th Century art with Bill, but couldn't with anyone in Charleston either.

After we'd worked together the first week, Bill drove up with his brother Van and parked in my driveway. I went out to see what they wanted. He'd been to town to cash his check and had a bottle of Four Roses. I saw right off this was test time. See how much TJ can drink. I'm thinking no big deal. I left Charleston partially because I was on the verge of alcoholism and wanted to cut out the drinking, or cut it way down. So I had to show the boys I could drink. Take it from the bottle then chase it with 7up. Yuk. I let the 7up pass, thinking it's a shame we have to have a drinking contest with Four Roses. Johnny Walker or Glen Fiddich would have suited me better. But I was done with that phase of my life. Four Roses it was.

I tipped the bottle upward grossed out by the taste, didn't like bourbon anyway, took a good swig and handed it back. Big smiles. TJ can take it. Now, this is a contest I can hold my own in, I was thinking. We sat on the ground outside my house drinking and laughing and talking, telling crazy tales. There came a time I was on my back, laid my head over to the side and puked a couple of times, and stayed there. When I woke, Bill and Van had returned from town with another 5th. They were just getting started.

A few months ago I saw Bill the last time. I'd heard he was in the nursing home in Sparta with advanced Alzheimers. When I was in there seeing Jr during his first nursing home round, Bill was across the hall from Jr's quarters. One day I came face to face with Bill in the hallway. He shuffled about in untied shoes, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. I went up to him and said, "Bill." He looked at me. I said, "Remember me? I'm TJ." He smiled and said, "Wellington." That was close enough. I almost broke into tears. It was an emergency holding them back. Bill died a month or so ago. His brother Van followed him a week later. Don is in a nursing home situation in Black Mountain.

My first year here I ran with the three of them on weekends. They taught me where I was living. The Nile, the Pool Room, riding the back roads throwing beer cans out the windows, laughing, meeting people I still know and appreciate knowing like Wade Pruitt and Jerry Hawkins, among others. It was a one year crash course on the nature of what was to become the home of my soul. Bill said once he didn't want a preacher talking at his funeral like he was some great guy who never did anything wrong. He said, "All I want the preacher to say is, He done the best he could." And that he did.