by John Lingan
Outside it was early twilight, and I saw that the picnic tables in the park had been turned into makeshift commercial displays. There were rows of VHS tapes, scratched-up plastic cups and plates, silverware, toolkits, kids’ toys and bikes, faded Disney paraphernalia. All sitting in the shade, priced to go, waiting for someone to offer them a second or third life. Long ago, walking through John’s Music, I’d wondered how these kinds of redneck junk shops come to be. Now I understood. No one sets out to own a place like this.
I’d never been in Jim’s actual home, the trailer he shared with his wife. It was right there, next to the parking lot for all to see, but it was the one portion of the Troubadour grounds that wasn’t open for business. I walked over, past the little white fence and through the short yard filled with plastic lawn ornaments, ascended two steps, and knocked on the trailer door. I didn’t wait for him to answer before I poked in.
It was dim and overstuffed like every surface of Jim’s life. Recording equipment by the coffeemaker, phone books piled on a fabric recliner. Hundreds of loose pages stood in sloping piles on a plastic card table by the door, mostly printed-out comments from the Troubadour Facebook page. A monitor by the window showed the security-camera footage from the parking lot. Jim was on the couch, trucker hat on, gazing up at a TV playing Fox News. I’d never heard him speak a word about politics. He lowered the volume as I sat down next to him on the couch.
“This used to be my office,” he said apologetically. “It’s a rehab place now. They wanted me close by the bar so they could keep an eye on me. Keep me outta trouble.”
He’d been in the hospital six times in the previous seventeen months, for three separate operations. He hadn’t been in the bar in weeks, hadn’t had a drink in over a year. As for cigarettes, he was trying to quit. Matt Hahn and Jim’s team of doctors down at Winchester Medical Center had him on some pills that made tobacco taste terrible, but sometimes he just needed to smoke to calm his frustrations. Cigarettes helped soothe him as he sat holed up in his living room, unable to run around tending to all the things that needed his attention. He pulled one out, lit it, drew in deeply, and tossed the pack on the couch.
“You wanna feel something?” he asked, and pulled my hand over to his midsection. Underneath the work shirt I felt something that I probably wouldn’t have guessed was a human body if I’d had my eyes closed. More like scrap wood under loose fabric. He ran my fingers along a hard, long bump. “How do you like that? We got a rib that’s screwed up and touching my lung. Fell off of these steps,” he gestured to the front door. “Got that rib pretty good, didn’t it? They won’t do nothing for that. You got to live with it.”
He took a long drag and I watched the smoke curl in the unmoving air. On TV, Sean Hannity pursed his lips disapprovingly about the president. After a short silence Jim spoke again, quietly.
“I got so much I wanna do. Can’t do it. A friend came over and said, ‘You’re not putting no garden in?’ I said no. So he came back, tilled it, put it in for me. Now I go out there one day, like a stupid fool, and fell down in the middle of the garden and couldn’t get up. I laid there for a half hour before they found me. I tried to crawl over to a fence. Couldn’t even crawl. I wanted to plant . . . I think it was beans. All of a sudden my blood pressure was the problem.”
I asked him if the place was really for sale. He nodded. He and Bertha, who’d had her own cancer scare in recent years, just weren’t up for running it anymore. He was hoping to get $300,000, though no offers had come in yet. Potential buyers surely recognized that the initial overhead would be monumental: every aspect of the business could use upgrading and modernization, and that didn’t even account for the unseen things that an inspection would reveal. Last year a man from my corner of Maryland’s D.C. suburbs had come in with a friend and asked about buying it. Jim wasn’t looking to sell at the time, and now that he was, he couldn’t find the man’s name or phone number among the mountains of decades-old paperwork that surrounded him in every room.
“He’ll be back in the hunting season with his buddies, though,” Jim told me with certainty.
Supposedly that mystery man wanted to keep the Troubadour as-is. Jim would hand him the keys and the music would keep going. But even if that were the case, it’s no guarantee that the audience would be there to appreciate it.
“Last Saturday night, they told me they had sixteen ladies come in,” Jim told me. “We gotta get that business. The locals don’t have any money, they gotta drive to work, and D.C. or Hagerstown for big money. There ain’t nothing here.”
Another long silence settled in, and that was the most painful part of being in that trailer. Jim’s life had revolved around sound—the pursuit of it, the creation of it, the capture of it, the business of it. A night owl, he was used to stepping outside in the darkness to hear the crickets buzzing in the mountain breeze. Now he woke at night and couldn’t go anywhere, just lay in bed while the homeplace murmured beyond the trailer walls, awaiting a new owner who could tend to it properly.
“I’m just trying to get well,” he told me. “And I will get well. I’ve made my mind up.”
It’s hard to watch an old person sit still when they plainly don’t want to. Uncomfortable, I asked Jim if I could get him anything. He shrugged. Gave a sly fighter’s smile.
“I like sitting back and talkin’.”
8
Better Neighbors
A bright Saturday morning, before the walking mall was even awake, before the shadows disappeared from Piccadilly Street, I parked and walked eagerly toward Just Like Grandma’s, looking for my latest trip through Perry Davis’s breakfast menu. His skills, as I’d learned on numerous mornings at the counter, extended past bacon and eggs, and I was dreaming of hot coffee and some time with a Winchester Star when I grabbed the door handle and found that it didn’t budge. Through the glass, which I now realized had been scrubbed of the loopy scribbling that marked Perry’s business, I could see three people, all young and white, spread throughout the room with brushes and paint rollers. One woman came over and unlatched the door.
“Is Perry here?” I asked, looking over the woman’s shoulder and noticing a blank white wall where the small stereo, newspaper clippings, and family photos once were.
“Who?” she asked. From the far side of the room, where I’d once seen a skeptical woman try her first hollandaise sauce, a man in jeans and a white T-shirt shouted, “He gave this place up.”
“We open in two weeks,” the woman said, smiling. “The Piccadilly Grill. Burgers and salads.” I managed congratulations, and asked if she knew where to reach Perry.
“Try next door,” she said. “The beauty school.”
Ten feet away, another glass storefront window, this one filled with plants and a floor-length collection of sun-bleached close-ups of models with complicated ’90s haircuts. I entered through a door underneath a humming air-conditioning unit and walked past a wall of shampoos and hair-spray cans to a large woman seated behind a desk.
“Perry?” she thought for a second when I asked about her former neighbor. “Think I heard he was cooking at the Twilight Zone now. You know where that is?”
I surely did. One of Joe Bageant’s old hangs, on the southern end of downtown, right across the street from Gaunt’s Drug Store, where Patsy used to serve ice cream. I thanked her and left, heading into the walking mall and past the coffee shop where I’d met Barbara Dickinson and watched the town’s teens affect disaffection. Past the old Masonic hall and a brick building, now an antique store, with the midcentury painted logo for Sollenberger’s Apples still preserved on the side. All the way to Cork Street, the mall’s southern border, where a small stone building, purportedly George Washington’s office during the French and Indian War, was open for business as a museum. Beyond Cork, the streets were leafy and residential, full of townhomes with small porches set back from the wavy, mossy brick sidewalks. Other than the cars lining both sides of the thin street, there was little to distinguish
the scene from the 1950s. If you pined for a certain kind of past—one where neighbors borrow cups of sugar and chat on the sidewalk after they water their window boxes—you might feel that you’d found it here.
A couple blocks beyond that, where the trees became more sparse and the brick walks gave way to white concrete, I saw the Twilight Zone’s small awning. Across the street, I saw that Gaunt’s, still operational and owned by one of Patsy’s old coworkers when I first started visiting a few years earlier, was now closed. Nothing had taken its place. The khaki-colored building sat tall in the midday sun, a FOR SALE sign leaned up against the front window where a Patsy cutout had once stood. On its side, the art deco–style metal lettering had been removed from the painted brick, leaving GAUNT’S DRUG STORE in a faint black outline.
The Twilight Zone had changed as well, from a certifiable dive bar into something more upscale called T-Bone’s. Inside, a woman with chin-length hair was filling the glass racks and polishing the beer taps behind the bar. The Kardashians were arguing on a yacht on the TV when I sat down to ask about Perry.
“He doesn’t really work here, but he uses our kitchen to cook for catering jobs sometimes. Want me to give him a call?” She scrolled through her phone and handed it to me when it started to ring. I told him he didn’t know me but I was sorry to see his place go. Could he tell me why it happened?
“Tomorrow. I’ll be there at noon,” he said. “Come hungry.”
When I showed up the next day a few minutes early, the manager had already brewed a pot of coffee. A few minutes past twelve, Perry opened the door and cast a broad stretch of daylight through the dim bar. He wore a tight blue T-shirt and madras-patterned shorts and immediately asked if I’d eaten.
He disappeared into the kitchen and emerged ten long minutes later with a bacon and egg sandwich that must have been half butter. I took a few bites and had to use multiple napkins to clean my hands. So, I asked him, how does cooking like this find itself homeless?
“My landlord,” he explained. “It was one hassle after another. Those Historic District buildings are so outdated, and I wasn’t getting no help from him. I had my refrigerators under the grill, where they have to work hardest to stay cool. The seals on them were old and particular. I had the AC go out, the water heater died, and I had to replace them myself. My lease included utilities but he wasn’t paying any of them, and every time I signed a new one it was only for one year.”
Despite his long, tight dreadlocks and slow, methodical speaking voice, he reminded me more than anyone of John, the old junk-store owner up on 522. Perry had gotten priced out of his business whereas John had simply been left to rot, but they shared the same businessman’s despond, and a hypersensitivity to mistreatment. Perry had clearly itemized these issues before, to people who didn’t have any reason to care. He told me more, about the effort he’d spent getting the diner’s old vents and fixtures professionally cleaned, the equipment he’d purchased out of pocket after his landlord refused to perform basic upkeep, the underhanded racism he experienced from his neighbors, who never so much as entered his restaurant to say hello or see his business up close. The bacon crunched in my mouth and I begged him to open another restaurant.
“I’m trying,” he said. “Working with a realtor right now who’s helping me find the right place. But I’m tired of Winchester. I’m tired of these closed minds, people just doing favors for their friends. I lost my spot because my landlord had friends who wanted it. Simple as that. There’s a lot of old money here but very little worldliness or experience. My first cooking job was here, at the restaurant under the George Washington Hotel. My boss, he was trained, he knew how to cook. He came from Antigua and had a real proper European menu—béchamel sauces, swordfish paillard, real food. And then these rich people come in and mispronounced it all. They’d ask me what a ‘beach-male’ sauce was, then get mad when I explained it. They didn’t want a black guy talking down to them.”
He wanted to leave. Maybe to Savannah, Georgia, where he’d visited and seen plenty of the kind of restaurant he most wanted to own—soul food but done well, with proper care. What kept him in Winchester was the old woman who his short-lived business was named for: Viola Lampkin Brown, now 104 and still fiercely Christian. Perry explained that he’d grown up sitting on the floor of her house, watching her pray in a trance. These days she still did it, and she had plenty to pray for: Perry’s mother was serving a thirty-year sentence for drug crimes in a federal prison in Connecticut, but the family had been mired in legal battles for years, arguing that her lawyer hadn’t represented her properly. Finally in 2014, they received word that her sentence was one of hundreds being commuted by the Obama Justice Department, though she wouldn’t be released for two more years, a few months after he and I were speaking. If she could make it to 106, Viola Lampkin Brown would get to see the granddaughter who she thought she’d lost for life. How could Perry leave her now?
“I just got my associate’s degree in biblical studies,” he went on. “To be honest I’m okay not cooking all the time. I’m trying to focus on congregation-building, kingdom-building. Any business I open will be a ministry. Gigi”—that’s what he called his great-grandma—“instilled in me a sense of God’s love and the power of living with that love. That’s what I need to focus on now.”
Perry’s religious clarity notwithstanding, Just Like Grandma’s had now joined the many other businesses I’d seen fall or shrivel in only my short few years traveling through greater Winchester. The Troubadour for sale, Gaunt’s abandoned, John’s Music on life support. The Royal Lunch, too, had served its last light beer. Even Covey Pro, the leading wrestling magnates of the eastern panhandle, had stopped putting on events by 2016. And Perry himself had become one of the struggling, searching iconoclasts that this place tended to breed, a black Joe Bageant with a spatula instead of a word processor, filling up the Twilight Zone with righteous anger. He had seen the ugly side of the place at close range and now couldn’t see much else. All he wanted was a chance to serve other people and honor his family, but he was not the first person I’d met whose good intentions were strangled near George Washington’s office and picturesque porches.
Perry was only the most recent of my acquaintances to talk about Winchester in terms of real estate and housing. After all, the town started as one man’s property, and every sale since James Wood’s initial offering to the government of Virginia slowly democratized it. The best way to assert oneself out here was to own a place, and no surprise, in a region with so much acreage and so much of the economy based on buying and selling and modernizing it, the local government and power structure were stocked with landlords and developers.
But by 2016 I’d gotten to know a young man with a much different perception of the relationship between “home” and mere ownership. Oscar Cerrito-Mendoza was first described to me as a quadruple minority—Latino, an immigrant, gay, and disabled. Perry may have stressed the town’s closed-mindedness, but the word on Oscar was that he’d thrived in school and was now, in his early thirties, an accomplished professional and homeowner. In our initial conversations he had only smiles and gratitude for everyone he knew. On a late-March morning, I walked past Handley Library downtown and toward the squat building immediately to the west. This was Oscar’s workplace, the dual headquarters for AIDS Response Effort and the Community Assistance Fund. ARE had been active since 1991 but just purchased this new property in 2015. The building used to be a bank, and the architecture had not changed. Even the drive-through teller window remained. By the front desk, floor-length windows filled the main lobby with light. The receptionist’s chair was empty, and I heard nothing except a faint air-conditioner whirr, but the magazine racks and many open guest seats made it clear that this business saw plenty of traffic.
Oscar was in the basement, in one of a few windowless offices where his fellow do-gooders toiled. He sat upright, looking deeply into his computer, underneath an official certification from the Virginia Association of
Housing Counselors. Beyond that, only a small stitched fabric pattern hung on the wall, beside a tall gray file cabinet. Oscar’s ARE identification card hung around his neck on a lanyard against a blue button-down shirt. His right sleeve came down to his wrist, but the left was rolled up, an accommodation for his amelia—a congenital shortening of his arm about 4 inches past the elbow.
Oscar was at work on the unromantic nitty-gritty of social services: looking ahead, trying to make sure the grants overlapped, arranging for collaborations with bigger agencies. Nevertheless, he greeted me with the same disarming smile he always gave.
“We’re still waiting for new rapid re-housing funding,” he explained. “I’m trying to map out how the federal and state funds will cover things once the new grant cycle starts in July. Things are in a holding pattern now. Our intake and clinical side are hung up from the lack of funding.”
Oscar had worked for ARE only a few years but he’d clearly developed a talent for the persistent, long-term vision that career social servants have to cultivate. He’d started by traveling in his car throughout the agency’s purview, Lord Fairfax Health District number 7—including Clarke, Frederick, Page, Shenandoah, and Warren counties, as well as Winchester—finding people who needed housing. He’d since graduated to a coordinator, taking the wider view and supervising the efforts to get these homeless individuals into Winchester’s meager supply of available beds. Having seen the structural difficulties inherent in that task, Oscar developed a centralized intake system: one protocol for every hospital, shelter, rehab clinic, and social agency to use for these men (they were almost always men) so that their case histories were more comprehensive.
He now had a larger dream: a shared database of individual case histories and available services, so any professionals in the continuum of care could see their clients’ full journey and treatment so far. It was a data-driven approach that would be more useful if the supply of data were bigger. So Oscar’s current project was to bring it to Valley Health, the enormous and growing corporation that owned Winchester Medical Center and many other facilities in the area. By this point, Valley Health was the greatest source of data and human services infrastructure in the region, with direct ties to every kind of facility from neonatal care to hospices. Not unlike the Latino population that came to the area purely for fruit picking, Valley Health had become an inextricable, built-in part of their community. And nobody embodied their simultaneous rise like Oscar.