by John Lingan
The book was a minor sensation. Besides the blurbs from Zinn and Terkel, it caught the eye of Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B, which contacted Joe about doing a documentary series about Winchester. The project faltered, but the book still sold wildly in town. The Winchester Book Gallery, right on the walking mall, hosted the well-attended release party, though none of the town’s upper crust dared attend. For weeks after, however, the same rich landowners that Joe had pilloried came in to buy three or four copies at a time to send to friends. The store’s owner, a local many years younger than Joe, admired the writer’s ability to appeal to wealthy vanity. “Maybe if Patsy had written a song about them, they would have left her alone,” he said.
As more and more people read his writing and more journalists came to sit at his feet, Joe grew less and less hopeful that anything would change. He began looking away from his town, reaching out for grander truths. “It is seeing everything in material terms, just like our avaricious capitalist overlords, that holds us back,” he wrote. “We are in the sixth great species die-off here.”
In response, Joe used his book advance to move to Belize, a country he hadn’t seen in thirty years, and then only as a tourist. As he told it, he arrived in country and soon met a young family from the town of Hopkins Village, a coastal outpost founded by the survivors of a slave ship crash. He agreed to fund and help build a guesthouse that the family could rent for extra income. As payment, he could stay in it for free whenever he came to Hopkins. Three thousand miles from Shanghai Road, Joe felt he’d found one last bastion of the communal, sustainable life that American consumerism had long since made impossible. “What I get out of it is a feeling of direct accomplishment that a man can never have in this country,” he wrote on his site: “Being a working man in America means that, no matter how much you earn or how hard you work, it is never enough and the job is never done.”
This was of course a little insincere. This proud third-world survivalist owned nice property in a historic district in Virginia. He paid taxes on it, or at least his increasingly suffering wife did; Joe wouldn’t sully himself with such efforts. And while he was convinced of the impossibility of living a decent life in the contemporary United States, his old radical confreres had somehow managed. Jerry Roberts, who’d plastered Joe’s early poetry around Boulder, was now the Boulder County assessor. And Nick Smart, late of the Beat Hotel and the Paw Paw commune, had moved from residential to commercial real estate—he had in fact sold the land to Walmart that allowed it to build its Winchester megastore. Nick was now living with his wife on an expansive country property right on the Shenandoah River, with his daughter and grandkids on the adjacent lot. In semiretirement, he was raising a few dozen head of beef cattle that he sold to butchers. He read all the same stuff that Joe read—fat books about inequality and elite malfeasance—and he wanted the same things that Joe wanted, namely a life of solitude on his own terms. But he’d somehow managed to bend his ideals just enough to play along with the system he despised. In his mind, bringing Walmart to Winchester was almost a Samson-like gesture of morally necessary destruction: Nick had no affection for the old-money business crowd, and at least the new corporate competition challenged their centuries-long hold on the region’s every last dollar and civic decision. He and Joe still socialized and revered each other, but Nick was willing to make the normal compromises most people accept in order to buy affordable clothes or occasionally enjoy themselves in the first world.
Joe, by contrast, had become toxically pure. He wouldn’t cede moral high ground to anyone. As a result, he also couldn’t foster a true home or community, since coexisting with others requires sacrifice and compromise of a more mundane sort. He still lived half the year with Barbara in Winchester, but he joked that his months away were his gift to her. He knew he’d grown intolerably bleak, and he was so terrified of a third divorce that it seemed better to just stay away and avoid fights as often as possible. She didn’t bother to discuss her own life because she didn’t feel like getting a lecture or being made to feel petty. Compared with the Belizean poor, she had nothing to complain about, after all.
At the invitation of Ken Smith, Joe bought a cheap apartment in Ajijic, an expat-filled town near Guadalajara, Mexico. He needed a nearby international airport to make it to his frequent speaking invitations abroad. A few days before Christmas 2010, less than a week after Joe had gone into the Mexican mountains on horseback to drop acid with a group of gauchos, Ken took him to a doctor to have a nagging stomach pain checked out. An X-ray revealed a gastrointestinal stromal tumor, bigger in mass than his liver. It was clenched around his stomach like a fist, inoperable. “I don’t want to die in the America I see emerging,” he had written four years earlier, justifying his move to Belize. He would not get his wish. After three months in and out of VA hospitals and a prescription painkiller haze, Joe died with Barbara, Cindy, and his three kids by his side. In lieu of a funeral, they drove up to Shanghai Road and scattered his ashes in private. An outpouring of grief came on his website, where Ken rounded up dozens of tributes by bloggers and writers from around the globe. Joe was not memorialized in Winchester.
Given his nonstop battles with it before and after he returned as a well-off adult, the natural question is why Joe felt compelled to go back to Winchester in the first place. Perhaps he genuinely remembered it with affection, in spite of its flaws. Perhaps, like many displaced southern men on the far side of middle age, he simply missed the pace and climate. I suspect that he kept coming back throughout his life to prove he could beat the town—to show that he could transcend the role he’d been forced into as a child. But the shame of poverty still clung to him like rust. He could sense it in others, and couldn’t forgive Winchester—or Virginia, or the United States, or the entire world—for making people live with it. The writing he did as an older man was his effort to burn it all to the ground. In Deer Hunting with Jesus, he wielded the full force of his self-education and counter-consciousness to fume at the people who profited off the land instead of honoring it. In Rainbow Pie, he valorized the people who had taught him to love the land in the first place. Neither effort bought him any goodwill locally. The rich folks were offended and the country folks didn’t even read his books; they barely read at all. But in his small way, he laughed last. Anyone who reads these books will forget all about apples and Stonewall Jackson and artful latte foam. From now on, Winchester will be the American capital of small minds and venal cruelty.
I left the walking mall and drove back toward Berkeley Springs. Five minutes north of Winchester on Route 522, the highway becomes hilly and open, and begins to twist and roll. My favorite kind of road: a winding, two-lane, 50-mph state highway in the country. This is a commercially barren territory now, other than big signs advertising acreage. But I noticed a lone store on the southbound side, right in the notch of a mountain curve. There were no cars in the gravel lot when I rolled in and parked beneath a 20-foot-tall sign that read, in three faded yellow sections:
JOHN’S
MUSIC
GAS
Inside I found hundreds of square feet of shelf and table space, all piled high with cast-off knickknacks and domestic detritus. Praise it: a genuine redneck junk shop. Cowboy hats, Tasmanian devil T-shirts, themed salt and pepper shakers, bulbless desk lamps, shovels and hoes, stiff empty golf club bags, Christmas ornaments, nonfunctioning wall clocks, coasters, ashtrays, cloudy glass bottles, fishing rods, mugs with slogans like “WE CAN TALK ONCE I GET MY COFFEE!!!,” dust-covered wicker baskets, and American flags, my god, so many American flags. All of it marked with tiny neon-orange price stickers, so if you squinted you saw only an undifferentiated brown mass of yard-sale garbage with an alien, orange-starred sky overlaid. The place reeked of mildew.
A sweaty, friendly man with big eyes approached and I learned that this was in fact John, who ran the store with his wife. Frankly, he looked like he needed a rest, and not only a few hours. With only the slightest provocation, he beg
an an hour-long rant about the economy, though “began” probably isn’t the word. From the sound of it, this was an ongoing inner sermon, and John spent his days tidying up his kingdom of unwanted gewgaws, waiting for someone to ask him about the state of the union.
“The people thought they were gettin’ a bargain,” he explained in a desiccated drawl. “They started sending their money to other states, other countries. I’m sorry, that’s not a bargain. In this country, for a long while, you cannot run a legitimate business and get any farther than the end of the line. Everything now is trick-you this, trick-you that. Their business”—he pronounced it bidness—“is they leverage every point that they can. So until people educate themselves . . . they’re not getting a bargain. Lotta times they’re paying more. Walmart’s the worst.”
He kept going, directing his ire at the “bracket system,” whereby a corporation sells its product in tiers—high-end, midprice, and low-end, the last of which John’s people are of course more than happy to buy. John’s Music used to be a full grocery that fed every working person in a 20-mile radius, but he couldn’t compete with a big chain’s ability to buy in bulk, and he couldn’t bring himself to stock the excitingly affordable half-filler meat that his neighbors fell in love with. More than anything, he sounded betrayed: his people fell for it. Lured by discounts, they hung him out to dry. After a few minutes of similar talk that could have been transcribed verbatim and passed off for a lost chapter of Deer Hunting with Jesus, I asked John if he’d ever read Joe Bageant.
“Never read his book, but I know him well,” he said. “Joe brings his TV people in here, when they come to ask him about things. And those fishing vests. This right here is where he bought ’em.”
I was disarmed by his use of the present tense. Uneasily, I asked if he knew Joe had died more than two years earlier. His shoulders sank.
“I . . . I had no idea,” he said, wiping his forearm across his brow. He called over to his wife, who was sitting behind the register, near the glass jewelry case. “You know Joe Bageant died?”
“Joe Bageant?” she said. I watched a memory flood her face. “Oh no.”
“How’d it happen?” asked John. I told him stomach cancer.
“Gosh.” He took a long breath and stared out the window at the lonely highway. No one came in the shop.
“Joe, he was smart,” John said finally. “He understood all this stuff. I can’t believe this.”
A huge part of Joe’s appeal was his sympathetic depiction of people like John, and scenes like this rotting old knickknack graveyard. Joe knew that many liberals dismissed his people as heartless, dumb, or both. But he depicted them on their own terms. Without quite excusing the racist tendencies or religious zealotry in his community—and there were more than a few items in John’s store to offend both the uptight and the faithless—he saw them as essentially victims. There were money-grubbing Republicans who gave empty lip service to their most conservative values, yes, but there were also supposedly enlightened liberals who overlooked rural white poverty because they dismissed those values out of hand.
The real message of Deer Hunting with Jesus was that rural poor people were in line to revolt before too long. Even lifelong hillbilly Democrats like those in rural Virginia could see that liberal politicians didn’t have any interest in businesses that actually served as a locus for a community—places like the Troubadour. They could tell that raising a region’s average household income isn’t worth half a damn if it’s achieved by installing hundreds of upper-middle-class families in prefabricated homes while those in trailers go into bankruptcy from their medical bills. Joe tried to warn his liberal readers that a reckoning was on its way. Lives were being destroyed out there in the heartland. Hard-working people were suffering unimaginably.
But his very insights and anger distanced him from the people he was advocating for. He was one of the last people in the Virginias to grow up in a subsistence culture, and that culture’s sudden end forced him to romanticize it beyond usefulness. He went from rural heaven to lower-class shame when he was only a child, and for the rest of his life he was unable to stick with any plan, place, or project for longer than about eight years. He burned through relationships, jobs, and residences with equal intensity, and was capable of leaving all of them without even a good-bye, just as he made his final exit without any public acknowledgment whatsoever. Something about the doomed transition from Over Home to Winchester inured him to upheaval and loss. He simply powered through life, forever the cornered animal, reading both success and failure as justification to escape elsewhere. After all, nothing lasts.
When the Internet finally presented Joe with a community of similar seekers, he responded generously. He brought his readers’ voices onto his site and engaged them at length. He flew around the world to meet them in person. The response all over was the same as it was in John’s junk shop: Joe understands. Despite multiple attempts, he never managed to create the kind of sanctuary that southerners value most—the place where neighbors and family can lay aside their troubles, like John’s Music or Patsy’s shift at Gaunt’s or the Troubadour had all managed to be at one time. But he managed to express, with eloquence and tragic outrage, exactly why those kinds of places were now more endangered than ever.
Before leaving I picked out two records from John’s massive selection of water-damaged LPs—an early Watson Family collection and a Carter Family album called ’Mid the Green Hills of Virginia, complete with Shenandoah-looking cover art. John was still railing as his wife rang me up, and she shook her head and looked up at me over her glasses. It was neither a mocking look nor a complaining one, just a silent recognition: Once you’re gone, it’s gonna be just me listening to this.
The total came to $15, about five times what I would have expected for a couple pieces of warped vinyl. As I pulled out of the parking lot, John sat there, spilling out of his plastic lawn chair, sweating and sighing in a garage-door-shaped frame of afternoon Valley light. It might be hours until someone came in to buy something. Worse yet, it might be longer until someone came in willing to listen.
Part Three
Homeplace
7
They’ll Have to Carry Me Out
The Troubadour wasn’t only for parties. The more I went, the earlier I tended to arrive, stopping at the picnic tables before entering to enjoy a few minutes of daytime cricket chatter or a stroll around the garden. Years after the fall of the Highland Ridge canning industry, Jim’s tomatoes still sprang from the dirt like bamboo. The vines climbed hungrily and the leaves gobbled sunlight. The late afternoon was the perfect time to come here, to slow down and adjust to the mountain pace before the honky-tonkin’ began. To hear the breeze rustle Jim and Bertha’s “hillbilly wind chimes,” a quartet of crinkled Natural Light cans hanging on string just outside their trailer door. To see a squirrel scurry along the tall white fence, above the personalized canvas banner that Budweiser had sent for Jim’s eightieth birthday in 2009. And then, having gathered yourself and let your city worries drift out into the air like Pall Mall smoke, to turn the doorknob and hear the way it squeaked, the way the door eased shut with a soft creaking groan. Early enough in the day, you could hear and feel just how many tired, relieved people had walked through that entryway and worn it down until it sighed just like they did.
On one such day, a TV had been set up by the stage, a first in all the times I’d been there. Codi was at the bar, dispensing long pours of rail liquor into a Sunny Delight bottle to make the night’s Rocket Fuel. Bertha was counting receipts and talking idly to the sole customer, a big-bellied man in a tight T-shirt who sipped from a sweating bottle and picked at the paper label. Jim was sitting with a friend I didn’t recognize, watching TV in silence. He gestured me over and I sat on his other side.
The program looked like a megachurch service: royal blue lighting, an ace backing band, impassioned speeches, wailing tears from the front row. Jim filled me in.
“George Jones’s fun
eral,” he said. “Charlie sent me up the tape from Nashville.” We watched Mike Huckabee fawn. “He wanted me to come down for it.” Jim’s physical inability to make that trip hung in the air, unsaid.
Jones had died a few weeks earlier, after battling one of country music’s most legendarily destructive relationships with alcohol. He lived into his early eighties and, despite lung trouble in his last years, was still performing in arenas less than three weeks before his death from respiratory failure. The funeral was held at the same Opry House stage that he’d lorded over for decades, as was only fitting: Jones and the Opry matured into institutions alongside each other, and pushed Nashville into its star-factory era, the Hollywood of the South.
Jones was born two years after Jim, and grew up similarly in a 2-square-mile town in east Texas called Colmesneil. He was musical from an early age, and entertained his large family by singing. Like Jim, he got his start playing on postwar country radio stations, and eventually found a home on Starday, one of the most successful of the honky-tonk-era record labels. He married young, had children young, and had his first chart success with bouncy pop country 45s like “Why Baby Why.” This was the mode that Jim’s Melody Playboys were versed in, but unlike Jim—unlike anybody—Jones had a voice that could blow down a barn. He sang the title syllables of “Why Baby Why” like a baritone siren; they sound authoritative no matter how small the speakers. He moved from Starday to Mercury Records in the late 1950s and found even greater fame, notably with “White Lightning,” a believably nostalgic rocker about daddy’s moonshine. Jones’s career had its peaks and valleys through the 1960s, though industry respect for his voice only grew. But in 1969, soon after Jim McCoy had accepted fate and decided on a life in Winchester, Jones married fellow balladeer Tammy Wynette, and not long after that, moved to Epic Records and began working with producer Billy Sherrill.