Homeplace

by John Lingan

  In 2007, a middle-aged Winchester native named Joe Bageant wrote a scathing essay about the walking mall and its deadening tourist-trap charm. He described the very coffee shop where I was sitting as the town’s “obligatory Starbucks knockoff,” and that was one of his kinder judgments. The occasion for his essay was Winchester’s First Friday celebration, where the shops stayed open late and enticed buyers with wine and spreadable cheeses. Joe attended with his wife, Barbara, and came away haunted as usual:

  A well dressed woman, one of our many Yankee transplants, stands nearby gabbing about why she chose a certain artificial condo development called “Creekside Village,” a development more or less embedded in a shopping center at the edge of town, as opposed to others as far as a mile from a mall. What more could a person ask for in life than to [live] within walking distance of Jos. A. Bank, and Ann Taylor? . . . Anyway, Mall Locked Village would have been too obviously accurate a name, so the pretense that a creek once filled with crawdads is still there was probably a better choice. I cannot help though, but remember the old wetland where the red winged blackbirds perched on the cattails and sumac branches, piercing the muggy stillness of summer, issuing their crystalline cry before lifting off to nudge the sky with their bold red shoulders.

  At the time he wrote this, Joe had just published his first book, an essay collection called Deer Hunting with Jesus, which was full of similarly crestfallen threnodies that made Winchester sound like the evil nexus of a permanently corporatized, fallen world.

  His hook was that he spoke as an insider, a leftist skeptic who also knew the white underclass world—the Troubadour side of the equation, including the Troubadour itself—firsthand. Born in 1946, Joe left Winchester as a young man to travel and write throughout the West. He returned right as the country elected its second President Bush, having convinced Barbara, his third wife, that the move would calm them after years of uninspiring professional jobs in suburban Oregon. Instead, their relocation knocked something loose inside Joe. Drinking at his favorite dive bars—working-class holes like Coalie Harry’s and the Royal Lunch, across the street from the George Washington Hotel—he reconnected with some of the people he knew as a young man. And to Joe’s surprise, the old gang was mostly terrified and enraged. They thought everything was turning against them.

  He gradually lost his corporate air and grew feral. He dressed in old work clothes and grew his beard out again. At karaoke nights and in the 7-Eleven parking lot, Joe listened to his people despair over their menial jobs, health-care debt, and the liberal media. He was disgusted by his friends’ closed-mindedness, but their world-consuming panic infected him. He saw it all on a historical continuum: the old First Family and orchard-owner classes were now slumlords and land developers, and a new crop of wealthy outsiders had come to town bearing ciabatta and craft beer that few locals could afford.

  Deer Hunting garnered a six-figure advance and blurbs from Studs Terkel and Howard Zinn. It led to speaking invitations in England, Italy, and Australia, where Joe shared stages with leftist figureheads like Thomas Frank and Barbara Ehrenreich. His ideas were quoted approvingly by the New York Times, NPR, and the BBC, particularly as the 2008 presidential election neared. In his seventh decade, Joe Bageant was suddenly the last thing that a shitkicker from the lower rungs of Valley society was ever expected to be: a public intellectual.

  And in everything he wrote, he made clear that his observations about inequality, the death of regionalism, and bubba culture were all grounded in his hometown. “Like most modern Southerners who’ve fled their native states for long periods of time,” he wrote in 2004, in the first piece to appear on joebageant.com:

  I have the standard love/hate relationship with my home town—Winchester, Virginia. On one hand, it is a backward and mostly irrelevant place where the question of whether Stonewall Jackson had jock itch at the Battle of Chancellorsville still rages right alongside evolution and abortion. To be sure, it is the standard venal Southern place, where poverty and ugliness are thrust into one’s face daily, with all the gothic family melodramas of greed and intrigue so often written about [in] Southern novels. On the other hand, it is the place that made me who I am, a moralizing, preachy and essentially lazy bastard who likes to drink.

  With the exception of Willa Cather, who was born in nearby Gore, Virginia, no writer from the area ever achieved the level of fame and influence that Joe Bageant did in the first decade of the twenty-first century—and Cather barely wrote about the Valley. Joe, by comparison, elevated it to a personal Rosetta stone for his understanding of what had gone wrong with his country and his species.

  Through the coffee shop’s glass I saw a middle-aged blonde woman approach and knew instinctively she was my appointment for the morning, Barbara Dickinson herself. She’d lived in Winchester for fifteen years, but you could tell she was from outside. Her ranginess and cautious friendliness marked her as midwestern, originally from Wisconsin. Barbara set her crinkled brown shopping bag down and went to the counter for her coffee. When she got back with a wide mug, she pointed out the leaf pattern in her latte foam.

  “Here’s how you can tell D.C. is creeping in,” she said. “We have baristas now.”

  Sitting in the coffee shop, Barbara and I were about two blocks south of the colonial that she and Joe lived in during his transformation, a big ramshackle palace with a pillar and a porch on a corner lot. It was right next to the Stonewall Jackson House, the general’s residence during the Civil War, now a museum. There was a semi-stunned quality to her voice as she discussed the Deer Hunting years, like Joe’s anger had ambushed them both.

  “He came back with all this hope, these memories,” Barbara told me, stirring her coffee. “He had created this wonderful environment in his mind—and there are some very nice people here—but that anger kept bubbling up. Coming back and seeing all this inequality was just . . . too much.”

  If Jeanne Mozier’s benevolent takeover of Berkeley Springs represented the feel-good version of the upper Valley’s recent cultural transformation, Joe Bageant was the most vivid chronicler of that transformation’s psychic toll. In a place as historically self-sustaining as Winchester–Berkeley Springs, the sudden influx of outsiders that started in the 1960s and 1970s represented a true cataclysm, and everywhere you go you still see the fallout from it. The arrival of Joe’s reviled Creekside Village—like the arrivals of Walmart’s megastore and the Rubbermaid factory—showed that the chamber of commerce was more concerned with attracting the right kind of outsiders than improving the lives of people who were already there. A new walking mall doesn’t make a working person’s life any easier, but the gradual loss of long-standing businesses can make them feel frightened and powerless. Joe knew they weren’t wrong to feel this way. He had managed to escape the working class and still felt this way himself.

  Barbara pulled the brown bag out from under her chair and started searching through the makeshift archives that Joe had left behind. I wondered how she lived in this place without him, how she forgave it for the pain it caused her. But maybe without Joe’s bleak, unceasing harangues sullying the air around her, Barbara was exactly the kind of sunny out-of-towner who could love Winchester without complication. She could see that a place like this coffee shop was in fact perfectly comfortable and welcoming, and that any town would be lucky to have a walkable strip of decent food and tchotchkes next to a stunning library.

  She chose a couple of photo albums from the bundle of manila folders and scribble-filled notebooks. Outside, beyond the window behind her, the walking mall stirred. But the pictures on these stiff pages recalled an earlier, gruffer Winchester, when Loudoun Street was still a place where farmers and housewives shopped. Joe had put these albums together with no allegiance to chronology, so snapshots of his mid-’60s beatnik phase sat next to others of his three kids, twenty-five years later. There were a few of his father, but only in old age, and nothing at all from Joe’s earliest years, because that life didn’t include cameras.r />
  He was born on Highland Ridge in 1946, a few miles south of where young Jim McCoy was just coming into his own as a guitar player and hitchhiker. Joe knew the family land on Shanghai Road as “Over Home,” a place where generations of Bageants had grown, picked, and preserved their own vegetables and slaughtered their own hogs, all without modern machinery or vehicles. In a memoir, Rainbow Pie, written after Deer Hunting with Jesus but never published in America, he described his childhood as “anachronistic even in the 1950s . . . charged with folk beliefs, marked by an ignorance of the larger world, and lived unselfconsciously under the arc of Jeffersonian ideals.”

  The only currency in such a life was work, “calories burned.” Joe estimated that his grandfather never made more than $1,000 a year, but the family lived plentifully on only a few acres of vegetables, a small stock of animals, and deeply ingrained wisdom about the management of each. Highland Ridge was dotted with similarly rooted families, including the McCoys. They patronized the same general store for staples and relied on each other for the rest of their worldly needs, like a truck to haul the tomato harvest to the nearest cannery. It was “a system where everyone benefited through an economy of labor,” Joe wrote in Rainbow Pie, “with the small money of small farmers supplying the grease for the common-sense machinery of community sustenance.” And even before Joe was old enough to join hunting trips with his daddy and uncles, it was doomed.

  All those Byrd-beloved postwar agricultural regulations made quick work of hill-country enterprises like the Bageants’ and McCoys’. New highways and corporate subsidies gave large-scale manufacturers an advantage over family farms. It took barely a generation for rural Americans to adapt, and soon they were completely ensnared by corporations. They started working for the same people who had put them out of business, typically on assembly lines or by “driving truck.”

  In the late 1950s, Joe Bageant Sr. had a teamster’s salary coming in and a big rig that made mountain driving unfeasible. So he took his wife and children to the city and left Over Home to the grandparents. The Bageants’ arrival in Winchester was really a homecoming, since the family name had been there as early as 1751, but they weren’t welcomed warmly. The town was still Byrd territory through and through. Joe would later claim to have mowed Harry Flood Byrd’s lawn as a teenager, though he had a lifelong fondness for suspiciously unverifiable stories, particularly regarding brushes with celebrity. By various friends’ accounts, he was babysat or given a toy or sung to by Patsy Cline, who was still returning to South Kent Street in between recording dates and unglamorous shows when the Bageants came to town.

  Whether or not he actually cut the senator’s grass, Joe was immediately affected by the stark class division that Byrd and his ilk embodied and enforced. His father quit trucking and took up repair work at an auto shop, but money remained tight. The Bageants moved whenever they fell behind on rent, which meant they moved constantly. Even as a teenager, Joe sensed that their relocation to the city had cost them more than just a place on ancestral land. His mother was repeatedly hospitalized for depression, and his father, a locally renowned laborer whose own manual work had once been enough to fill his three kids’ bellies, now struggled to keep their bedroom heated. Joe so pitied his father that he didn’t even hate the man for taking the shame out on him with a belt.

  Bad at school, bad with girls, beat at home, he found refuge at the Handley Library. Joe would often skip school to pursue what he called a “marvelously undirected pursuit of the mind” consisting of everything from Boy’s Life to Pericles’s orations, Civil War diaries, and Native Son. He also painted well enough for a mail-order art school representative to visit one of the Bageants’ many addresses and offer a scholarship covering two-thirds of the course’s tuition. Joe, then thirteen, offered to pick up an extra paper route to cover half of the remainder, but his father still had to decline. That last $50 was too much for the family to bear on a car repairman’s wages.

  This was how Joe learned about the shame of poverty. Not material lack—the subsistence life on Shanghai Road had certainly been dollar-poor—but the brutal reality of a sixty-hour work week for non-negotiable pay that barely covered life’s necessities, let alone your son’s blooming artistic dream. It was the unfair terms of the struggle that stuck with Joe, the fact that wealthier people had pushed his family off the farm, then kept them in a chokehold when they landed in town.

  Like Jim McCoy, Joe cultivated dreams of escape, and leapt at whatever unglamorous opportunities presented themselves. Joe dropped out of school, lied about his age, and joined the navy at age sixteen, serving noncombat time aboard the USS America. His military career was only just long enough to secure VA benefits, but when he returned home he found a beautiful country girl named Cindy. Her tight curls hung around her face like a halo. And then, like a revelation: acid. He first tripped in 1965, right as Julian Wood Glass Jr.’s reimagining of Glen Burnie was in full swing, and poignantly, Joe received his first dose “thanks to my gay friend George, who was being ‘treated’ for his homosexuality with lysergic acid and enjoying every minute of treatment.” As an adult, Joe called LSD “the Promethean spark of whatever awakening I have managed to accomplish in this life . . . For the first time in years, my life in that small town was very enjoyable.”

  Joe soon became involved in a “small psychedelic scene, one among thousands in heartland America at the time.” Such a group would have shopped at the record store that Jim McCoy opened in Ward Plaza in the mid-’60s, where he would typically respond to young people’s requests for the Beatles by recommending cornpone truffles like Jim Reeves’s “Roly Poly.” Jim abstained from drugs all his life, the result of watching fellow musicians and working men destroy themselves through every pill, pipe, and powder they could manage. Perhaps he recognized the particular glint of these young hippies’ eyes, or even admired what local officials referred to as their “suspicious happiness.”

  Eventually, the Winchester Christian class couldn’t abide the underground psychedelic resistance anymore, and Joe was the inaugural victim of the crackdown. He claimed for years to have been Winchester’s first marijuana arrest, and also said that he lived in Resurrection City, a short-lived social-justice commune in Washington, D.C., while awaiting trial. This dates the ordeal to summer 1968, meaning he was already a father; Cindy gave birth to Timothy, named for Leary, in 1967. Joe was acquitted but the experience shook him. He knew he couldn’t keep his young family and newly expanded consciousness locked in Byrd country anymore. In 1969, he and Cindy escaped in a school bus, hayseed flower children set free.

  At the time, Boulder, Colorado, was teasingly referred to as The Buckle of the Granola Belt, and indeed there might as well have been a dog whistle blaring on Pearl Street, beckoning the nation’s dropouts and longhairs. The open sky and relative seclusion had attracted everyone from the Weathermen to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band to Allen Ginsberg. The nearby Pygmy Farm, one of the innumerable rural communes spread across America at the time, hosted visitors like Chögyam Trungpa, the Buddhist scholar who loved the area so much he stayed, founding Naropa University and the Shambhala Meditation Center in 1974.

  Joe and Cindy pulled in after nearly a year of extensive travel in the bus, and their ultimate goal was still San Francisco. But the Rockies felt like kismet. Joe liked to say—again, unverifiably—that they pulled into Boulder on the inaugural Earth Day, April 22, 1970. The atmosphere of Buddhism, banjos, and Beat poetry made San Francisco seem unnecessary.

  The mood in Boulder was high-minded in every sense, but Joe was the son of a laborer with a son of his own, so he wasn’t averse to serious manual work. At one point, moving boxes at a grocery store, his back gave out. Laid up in the hospital, Joe began to write. He shared a poem when his friend Jerry Roberts came to visit, a “Howl”-indebted portrait of Boulder’s nightlife scene. Jerry made copies of the poem and posted them around the city. When he was discharged, Joe reentered a city that had been plastered with his words. They were u
n-bylined, but the thrill jolted him. After an adolescence that had been marked and saved by books, he suddenly realized he had a literary voice. And after years in a place where worth was dictated by money and bloodlines, he was living somewhere that welcomed his mind.

  Using raw talent, enthusiasm, and all available drugs, Joe willed himself into a writing career. He began scrounging freelance assignments, writing features about local characters and touring musicians for the Colorado Daily, Rocky Mountain News, and other regional venues. His steadiest work came with a Boulder-based ersatz Rolling Stone called the Rocky Mountain Musical Express. Joe was its main editor by 1977, though he was so prolific a contributor that he often ended up filling issues with his own work under multiple pseudonyms. He interviewed the Naropa people, Burroughs and Ginsberg, Hunter Thompson (then living in Aspen), and Timothy Leary. He profiled drug smugglers, car thieves, Karen Silkwood’s attorney, and Colorado’s last remaining cowboys. One freelancer, a former bassist for ? & the Mysterians, visited the Bageant trailer home to deliver a draft for the upcoming issue. He was a new writer himself, and in the course of a pep talk about the craft, Joe handed him a copy of The Elements of Style and a bag of speed. Then he sent his protégé back into the world with assurance: “If you want to write, here’s what you need.”

  He also traveled prodigiously. With Cindy and Tim he saw Belize and Mexico in 1975, and he took a musical pilgrimage to Memphis with Jerry around the same time. Most affectingly, Joe started taking road trips with the Express’s distributor, Ward Churchill, who would later, around the time that Joe became a famous blogger, gain infamy for using the phrase “little Eichmanns” to describe the World Trade Center workers who died on September 11. Back in Boulder, Churchill was a burgeoning activist for Indian country, and took Joe on numerous trips to reservations throughout the mountain West to meet warrior-intellectuals like Russell Means and Vine Deloria Jr. Joe was still a ceaseless reader, and would almost certainly have read Deloria’s epochal Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Published in 1969, Custer was a wry and bitter essay collection about the historical exploitation of a rural minority—in many ways, a template for Deer Hunting with Jesus.