Tommy was watching TV these days, and seeing finally how this shit is everywhere you look. Dissing the country bumpkins, trying to bring us up to par, the long-termed war of trying to shame the land people into joining America. Meaning their version, city. TV being the slam book of all times, maybe everybody in the city was just going along with it, not really noticing the rudeness factors. Possibly to the extent of not getting why we are so fucking mad out here.
It took a lot of emails of Tommy telling me how far back it went, this offensive to wedge people off their own holy ground and turn them into wage labor. Before the redneck miner wars, the coal land grabs, the timber land grabs. Whiskey Rebellion: an actual war. George Washington marched the US Army on our people for refusing to pay tax on corn liquor. Which they weren’t even selling for money, mainly just making for neighborly entertainment. How do you get tax money out of moonshine? Answer: You and what army. It goes a ways to explaining people’s feelings about taxes and guns.
Tommy said the world was waiting for a graphic novel about the history of these wars. I told him the world could hold its horses then, because I didn’t have the foggiest idea how to do that. Then went to bed, woke up, and started drawing it. He fed me story lines like kindling on a fire. I wanted to call it Hillbilly Wars, but he said no, people would think the usual cornball nonsense, hill folk shooting each other. Plus he pointed out there were other land-type people in the boat with us. The Cherokees that got kicked off their land. All the other tribes, same. Black people after they were freed up, wanting their own farms but getting no end of grief for it, till they gave up and went to the city.
Surprisingly, Angus was all over this. I’d been trying to get her interested in comics for an age. Then in college she discovers graphic novels like she invented them. Always sending me the latest one she’s crazy about. Not your run-of-the-mill sci-fi and crime, this girl was into dark. Jewish mice in the Nazi concentration camps. Kids growing up in a funeral home. The Incapables, she called fierce. I’d been telling her this forever, adult comics are all over the map. But not a single one out there has us in it, she said. Not wrong.
I ended up calling it High Ground. The two-hundred-years war to keep body and soul together on our mountains. I started putting up chapters on my site as I finished them, earning a weird and intense fan club, part history professors, part good ol’ boys. Then a guy emailed to say his company published graphic novels and might be interested in mine, could I send him all the material I had. This guy was in New York. Did he seriously think I was handing over my goods?
I talked to Annie on the phone pretty regularly, but after this news she wanted to see me in person. A book deal, Christ on a bike, quote unquote. She would look at everything I had, and help me put together a proposal. She offered to come to Knoxville. At this point Annie is something like eight months pregnant, if I didn’t mention that. You turn your back, shit happens. The sensible thing was for me to go to her.
Technically there was no reason I couldn’t. In three and a half years as a sober living resident, month by month, I’d earned a life without curfew, driving my own wheels, weekends away. The house managers were actually dropping hints. Viking was back in Bell County now, and Gizmo was lining up his options. There was literally no end to the line of guys waiting to get in here. But I couldn’t imagine going anywhere. Especially back there.
Driving wasn’t the problem, I still had an active license, which the other guys in the house regarded as magical. They’d all DUI’ed out, many times over, and here’s me without even a moving violation. I tried to explain Lee County, where all the cops are your relatives or dope boys or both. I did not have the Impala. My last act before leaving Lee County was to talk Turp Trussell into giving me two hundred dollars for the car and any pills he could find in there. In less than a month he ran it through a guardrail on that stretch of 421 people call “the hateful section.” Turp was shockingly intact, the Impala, RIP. Getting this news was like hearing that a childhood dog had to be put down. But there would be other cars in my life. From a friend of Chartrain’s mom, I scored an abused but affordable rescue Chevy Beretta, robin’s-egg blue, to celebrate one year sober. A month or so after that, I got up the nerve to drive it downtown. A year is a long time away from the wheel. Straight into city driving, quite the plunge. I tried to keep my eyes open and channel June Peggot parallel parking outside the Atlanta Starbucks. I’m in awe of that maneuver to this day. Men have married women for less reason.