Polly became his mother all over again. He complained to her about how my folks spoiled me and neglected him. “We shamed him about being jealous of you,” she told me. “We told him, well, that you were his mother’s only girl and he was her boy that had been away from her so much and had taken other people into his life. That was all right; she still loved him too.”
About 1957, Ronnie left Roanoke. The American Barber Shop, in business downtown since the twenties, disappeared from city directories. So did the building it inhabited. Ronnie moved a couple of counties away to Buck’s Barber Shop on Main Street in Lexington, Virginia. With two nearby colleges associated with Confederate generals, Robert E. Lee’s Washington and Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s Virginia Military Institute, Ronnie could snip hair all day and absorb history from Lexington’s patriarchal old guard. He rented a room above Main Street.
As in Roanoke, mentors popped up, prime among them the late Leon C. Johenning, a nationally known turkey-hunting writer and producer of handmade wood-and-metal turkey calls, tiny boxes that in the hands of a deft user could cluck, purr, and cackle just like a hen to draw a big, prize tom. From him, Ronnie learned about turkey hunting.
Ronnie began buying guns and renting hunting lodges with other men to hunt turkeys and other wildlife on the weekends. Leon eventually shot more turkey pictures than actual birds. Under his tutelage, Ronnie bought a camera and became a nature lover like Leon, exploring the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia, often alone, on his days off.
He was most intrigued by the oldest forests, where sycamores once measured forty-five feet around and where the wood from just one of those mammoths might fill an entire log train. Ronnie hiked alone into a national forest and waded across a river to an abandoned lumber camp and emerged with a prize—one of the numbered metal discs immigrant lumberjacks pinned to their clothes or wore on leather thongs around their necks as identification. At back-roads shops along his drives, Ronnie snapped up McGuffey Readers and other old books and antiques for a song and sold them at a profit to collectors.
In 1958, Ronnie pocketed a handsome raise when he moved to George’s Barbershop in Buena Vista, a small industrial town set against the Blue Ridge Mountains a few miles from Lexington. He began campaigning for Polly and Roy to let him return home. Neither were feeling well, and one visit became particularly strained. “He begged the whole weekend to come back, and we told him, well, he could always come whenever he wanted to [but] that he was a grown man now and could take care of himself . . . But just to give up his job and come, I said, ‘Don’t do that.’” Polly was caring for her mother, who was blind, and babysitting a niece. She had all she could handle.
Back in Blacksburg in March 1959, Roy Hall dropped dead in his garage. Ronnie went to his funeral, and there, among the friends and neighbors who came by the Halls’ bungalow after the service, Ronnie met his first serious girlfriend, a seventeen-year-old high school senior Polly and Roy knew through their church. Ronnie was twenty-three. He would date the girl for more than a year, but he lost touch with Polly. He felt her Christianity was turning too strident.
He’d heard that an old barber in Vinton was looking for a second-chair man at Phillips Barber Shop. Vinton was an easygoing little town of eight thousand hitched to Roanoke’s eastern hip. It was a working person’s quiet Mayberry, with a textile mill and lots of guys in need of conservative haircuts. The shop, in the heart of town, had a classy feel, with lots of light and ten-foot ceilings in patterned plaster. Ronnie earned his highest wages yet and rented a room nearby, where he’d serve his girlfriend lunch and fizzy nonalcoholic drinks.
Old Man Phillips, as Ronnie called Hubert Phillips behind his back, disciplined Ronnie professionally and otherwise. He pushed Ronnie to attend his Methodist church for Sunday school and worship. Ronnie and his girlfriend sat in the front row at eleven o’clock services. Soon, though, Ronnie and the girl split up, a hurt that remained lodged in Ronnie’s heart for the rest of his life.
Early in the 1960s, he rented a bedroom and adjoining kitchenette on Vinton’s hilltop Halliahurst Avenue. It was where the higher-ups lived, except that in Vinton, with few truly rich people, the higher-ups were bookkeepers, salesmen, an accountant, a teacher, a cafeteria manager, and a welder. For Ronnie, it was the Vinton equivalent of moving into the big house.
A widow named Maggie Booth rented two of her thirteen rooms to Ronnie. With her children gone, she treated him like a son and a helpmate. He did chores and feasted on Maggie’s home-butchered chickens and pigs, her homemade butter and biscuits, and apple butter and cherry jam made from her orchard. Maggie died, and all of a sudden, Ronnie was sharing the house with one of Maggie’s daughters-in-law, Maxine, a short, vivacious weaver at the textile mill.
I’ll never know the full nature of Ronnie’s relationship with Maxine, but Ronnie adored her. He called her Max—or Keys, she had so many of them. Sixteen years Ronnie’s senior, Maxine was like a generous big sister. She made banana splits for them. She caught the breeze with him on the front porch summer evenings and watched The Love Boat and The Dukes of Hazzard with him winter nights. He mowed her grass, changed her oil, and made her feel secure. If he wanted to draw closer, he was reluctant. He could risk losing his cozy home if things went sour, and being a pessimist, he figured they would. He’d better play it safe.
Instead, he dated Annie, that tall telephone operator he’d brought to the farm that one time I’d seen him when I was a teenager. She had a son from an early marriage, and Ronnie mentally compared his childhood with that of Annie’s little boy. The child had all the attention, toys, and food Ronnie never got from Mom, yet the kid wasn’t satisfied and, when grown, rolled in and out of prison for thefts and other crimes.
Annie, jealous of Maxine, pressed Ronnie for a commitment. “She wanted more.” He’d spend a day and most of a night with Annie, then go home to Maxine’s. Annie wanted to marry him. He briefly moved out of Maxine’s and in with Annie, but he wasn’t able to give himself fully to her. He felt more comfortable keeping one foot out the door in case somebody was about to boot him. He moved back in with Maxine, and Annie married another man.
On a solitary hike one weekend, Ronnie ran across a hermit living high in the mountains of Botetourt County, near Roanoke. Long before his choices became socially acceptable, even hip, Will Sloan lived off the grid, ate native plants to cure his ills, feasted on wild game, and grew his black hair and beard halfway down his chest.
Privacy-prizing Will nearly shot Ronnie’s head off the first time Ronnie stumbled onto his log house on Garden Mountain, a rocky three-thousand-foot summit slithering with rattlesnakes. Thereafter, when Ronnie was coming up, he’d mail a postcard in advance. Will earned a living digging up the fleshy roots of ginseng, a reputed aphrodisiac popular around the world. His outdoor easy chair was a fat log into which he’d chiseled a depression for his butt. He attached wooden arms to his mountain throne and sat there entertaining Ronnie with stories about how to domesticate a bear cub and how to tenderize the meat of the uncooperative ones. Will was wise, hilarious, tough, and thoroughly independent, just like Ronnie dreamed of being.
In 1967, Ronnie’s boss retired at sixty-five. For $647, Ronnie acquired the business, a revolving barber pole, barber chairs, an adding machine, a gas stove, a water heater, mirrors, lights, a snow shovel, and an awning over the door. He renamed the rented place the Sportsman Barber Shop.
Ronnie possessed serious spending money now. He squired girlfriends around a rustic nineteenth-century lake resort atop a peak near Blacksburg. He’d learned his way around the place through his friendship with the stable man, who gleaned a case of beer from Ronnie on every visit.
Down in Vinton, the town’s male muckety-mucks—lawyers, bankers, state legislators—all streamed into the Sportsman, along with highway pavers and garbage haulers. It was one of the few places in town where a guy could find the Wall Street Journal. One of Ronnie’s all-time favorite “heads,” as he called his c
ustomers, was Homer Hopper, an up-by-his-bootstraps executive who traveled the world setting up textile mills. Every Christmas for years, Ronnie had dinner with Homer and his wife, Bertha, who made sure there was a jar of homemade jelly or a little something under the tree for him.
The Hoppers’ son, Al, became one of the few close friends Ronnie ever had. Ronnie was at his best with Al and got to rattle around like a big dog, something like the powerful Keswick pooh-bahs he’d once envied. Ronnie and Al bought tickets to golf tournaments at the Homestead and Greenbrier resorts in the Appalachian Mountains, where prosperous people had been gathering for two centuries and where the two guys joked their way into the VIP lounges, replete with cigars, shrimp cocktails, and rich women.
Eventually, Al moved away, first to Houston, then to Richmond, and founded a small chain selling architectural and engineering supplies. Two or three times, Ronnie visited Al and his wife at their home in an affluent Richmond suburb. At the end of the day, Ronnie would sleep in his car in the Hoppers’ driveway rather than use their nicely appointed guest room. “I couldn’t get him to come in the house and go to bed,” Al recalled. “He didn’t want to impose on anybody.” Sadder yet, Ronnie probably didn’t feel worthy of the guest room, even at his best friend’s house.
* * *
RONNIE EMBARKED ON a self-improvement course. With the help of librarians and his better-educated customers, he devised a history curriculum for himself. He trudged around cemeteries in Bedford County to the graves of his Overstreet and McLain ancestors. He read thick histories of Bedford County, Mom’s home, and the counties all around. Through history books, he came to understand the haughty attitudes of Virginia’s first English-born lords and ladies and the servility of the indentured Irish, Scottish, and English immigrants who were his forebears.
Many of Ronnie’s readings dripped with white supremacy, and yet he also sought out Black Power writers of the sixties and seventies. He read Eldridge Cleaver, H. Rap Brown, and Malcolm X. He connected with what they said about how at the root of racial bigotry was a social class struggle that had ensnared poor people of all races since the beginning of this country. Powerful white men had always ruled with an unflinching fist. Ronnie had seen that for himself in Keswick.
He preferred reading about the little guys—the ingenious slaves, hillbillies, American Indians, and frontiersmen who knew this country best and whose knowledge of its natural systems was overpowered by industrial greed. Ronnie considered himself one of those clever survivors. Louis L’Amour’s frontier sagas traced Ronnie’s favorite fictional family, the Sacketts, as they hunted for treasure, mined for gold, fought mountain lions, and dug ginseng, just as Will Sloan still did.
* * *
EACH DAY AT the barbershop, Ronnie absorbed his customers’ stories and those they recalled from their great-grandpas. Even though his heads enriched his knowledge, Ronnie liked to rag on the monotony of how he made his living. “Cuttin’ heads, cuttin’ heads,” was his lament. “I am an ear,” he’d wearily tell his friends, complaining about the more boring stuff he was forced to listen to. But he fell into a slump each time illness or injury barred him from his hair-snipping station at the Sportsman.
Back in the fifties, during his final months at Western State, when administrators were trying to figure out what to do with Ronnie, his therapist told him about the different kinds of state training available to him. Ronnie could have become a welder. He could have been a watch repairman. He chose barbering.
The other trades would have been solitary, but in Ronnie’s otherwise lonely life, barbering fed him a regular, predictable intimacy that was tactile and friendly yet not so intrusive as to be threatening. Except for his customers’ occasional thank-you handshakes or slaps on the back, Ronnie did all the touching, on his terms, dozens of times a day.
By the time Ronnie and I got reacquainted, he’d been barbering more than thirty years. The instant a man or boy plopped down in his chair, Ronnie launched movements that composed a rhythmic song. He’d open his big right hand and, palm-down, whack a vertical hydraulic pump to adjust the chair’s height and lock it into position. Thud-click-bump, Ronnie’s motions sent the man sharply to the left and back in two seconds and said without his speaking, Hey, bub, hold on for the ride. Stay still and don’t mess with Slim Overstreet. He’d swish the brown plastic drape up into the air, toreador-style, so that it fluttered down perfectly over the man’s lap and shoulders. Next, he snapped open a white paper collar and deftly placed it around the guy’s neck so trimmings wouldn’t sift under his shirt. Then came the comb, the scissors, and the chatter. Ronnie was so big, his voice so deep, some men looked a little intimidated.
Ronnie’s prices were on his secret sliding scale, zero bucks to five depending on what you could afford and how much he liked you, and he was attentive to all his heads. He’d cultivated them from the time their mamas brought them in as toddlers. When a boy was getting his first cut, Ronnie softened the trauma by letting him reach into big jars of coins to buy candy and ice cream down the street. The nerviest kids reached into his cash register and grabbed greenbacks. Ronnie always let it go. He figured it was a long-term investment. Sure enough, years later a guy walked into the barbershop and plopped down a twenty-dollar bill. He’d stolen five dollars from his old barber as a kid and wanted to make it right.
Longtime heads wondered why Ronnie looked increasingly odd, but few of them said anything. By the eighties, he was reminding a few heads of the tall, big-browed manservant on the sixties sitcom The Addams Family. Ronnie grunted and scowled when those newer heads started calling him Lurch.
14
What Was Wrong
Ronnie’s driver’s license photos, showing the growth of his facial features, provided unintended documentation of his disease.
I was reading in bed when my phone rang at ten thirty on a Tuesday night. A newspaper editorial assistant was relaying a telephone message from a woman looking for Ronnie Overstreet’s sister. The caller couldn’t remember my name. All she knew was that I was a reporter. The editorial assistant pieced it together.
It was Ronnie’s landlady and good friend, Maxine Booth. She was frantic. The Vinton First Aid Crew had just taken Ronnie to Community Hospital of Roanoke Valley. He was in grave condition.
I’d never met Maxine. She’d gone away for a long weekend, and when she returned home that Monday afternoon in April 1990, she heard labored breathing from within Ronnie’s bedroom. The door was chain-locked from the inside. After much pleading by Maxine, Ronnie came to the door in his underwear, then collapsed on the floor. For almost ten hours, he refused to let her call the rescue squad. “Hell, no!” he thundered. Finally, just before she dialed the newspaper, he let them come. Maxine was exhausted, and fearful. She didn’t drive at night. “You need to go to the hospital, Mary. He might not make it.”
I threw on clothes and flew out the door. I’d known all along that something was wrong with Ronnie. But I kept my distance and didn’t ask about his health. Before I could see him that night, doctors told me that by the time paramedics reached Ronnie, he’d passed out again. He was dehydrated from days of respiratory distress. His blood pressure was 240/140, high enough to bring on kidney failure or a stroke.
Once he came to, he told the staff he hadn’t eaten for days. In the emergency room, they inserted a plastic tube in his throat to make sure he could breathe. He yanked the tube out a little while later in intensive care. Staff tied his hands and feet and reinserted the tube. In the space for family contacts on his hospital admission form, somebody typed in capital letters, “NO ONE.”
By the time I got there, Ronnie was sleeping and stable, so I went home and napped for a couple of hours. Right before I got back early the next morning, doctors tried to pull the tube out to see if he could breathe without it. His throat snapped shut. Ronnie panicked. I watched terrified through the window of the door as Ronnie bucked like a horse and the team of eight—doctors, nurses, an anesthesiologist, and a surgeon�
�struggled to reinsert the tube. They gave him Valium, and when he woke up banging his tied arms on the bed rails, more Valium.
As I walked down a hallway, one of the medical residents asked if I knew what was wrong with Ronnie. I said no, that we’d just gotten reacquainted after a lifetime apart. I couldn’t figure out why he’d changed so much since I knew him as a child. It took only three words to solve the mystery. “He has acromegaly,” the doctor said. I’d never heard the word.
Ronnie had a tiny benign tumor, little bigger than a postage stamp, on his pituitary gland. He’d had it for at least twenty years. The condition, acromegaly, had stimulated the gland to produce growth hormones that caused Ronnie’s forehead, nose, mouth, hands, feet, and heart to grow. The disorder led to shrinkage of his airways. It had nearly squeezed the life out of him. Normal growth hormones in an adult measure around eight. Ronnie’s were fifty in the first hospital test and, later that day, seventy-two.
Now it all made sense. After each time I’d seen Ronnie, I’d tried to explain to Mom and my friends how something was deforming him. I’d never seen anything like it.
The doctor said they could have stopped Ronnie’s acromegaly years ago, before it did most of its damage to his body, but no one was there with Ronnie to wonder what was wrong. Where was I in all this? Our mother? She’d seen him in the 1970s, and wondered, too, why he looked the way he did. But we were guarded around him. We hadn’t pressed the issue. Neither had Maxine.
In my first phone talks with Maxine, I zeroed in on her as my scapegoat. She sounded fake sweet. “He’s like one of the family,” she kept saying in her little-girl voice. “My whole family thinks the world of him.” She emphasized that she never went inside Ronnie’s bedroom, just down the hall from hers. “He’s a very private person.” She knew he was living “clean and right,” though, and that’s why she welcomed him to stay on after her husband died seventeen years before.
Don't You Ever Page 12