Bell Bridge Books

    ASHEVILLE – THE SETTING OF THE CROSSROADS CAFE NOVELLAS

by: Deborah Smith

My Inspiration . . .

He was a little guy, thin inside baggy thrift-store clothes, grubby-looking, with ear-flaps flapping on his cap as he walk-loped up theAshevillesidewalk toward my husband and me. It was nine a.m. on an autumn Saturday, bright and sunny and blue-skied, and we were headed up and down the hilly city streets toward eggs and soy sausage at Tupelo Honey’s.

We could see his lips moving as he came closer, but we couldn’t hear what he was saying and, even if we could read lips, we couldn’t see his. He held a ratty Teddy Bear in front of his face. A big one. We weren’t sure how he saw around it.

He never paused, never glanced our way, never stopped whispering to his bear. He and his secret friend passed by us and continued up the hill, two pals communing inside the mysteries of their minds.

Just another moment in theNorth Carolinacity where the favorite t-shirt slogans include “Why be normal?” and “It’s not weird, it’sAsheville.”

Of course every city has its share of citizens who live in alternate realities. But here, in this artsy-bohemian  informal capital of westernNorth Carolina(the mountain side of the state) “alternate”   is  square one  on the yellow brick road to everywhere.

“There’s the nun,”  someone says, as a guy in a habit flies by on a tall bicycle, hairy knees pumping as he dodges pedestrians and halloooos at the street performers. The flying bicycle nun can only mean one thing: the purple LaZoom comedy tour bus is coming.  It rolls by, a comedy routine in motion, the passengers wearing bizarre hats.

Hardly anyone gives it an astonished look.

Over inPritchardParkpeople are smoking roll-your-owns and playing chess at the granite chess tables; on Friday evenings dozens of drummers show up with djembes and rattles, bongos and small drums. The drumming is loud and primitive and exciting.  A lot of very bad stomp-dancing commences, mostly by white people, though the crowd is always diverse.   Kids run in circles, laughing.  Young women in peasant skirts roll their waist-bands down and  belly dance.

Hank enjoys that part. Go figure.

On my latest birthday I decided I wanted my ears pierced. Hank and I can’t agree that I should  get a tattoo – I keep working on that plan, but the ear piercings are the first baby steps toward my Wild Cronehood Transition, so far.

I come from the kind of southern family where one hole in each ear was the maximum; and that was only acceptable after about 1975 (among the Methodists;) not until the late 1980’s among the Southern Baptists.  I was raised among a wild branch of semi-Methodists, so Daddy pierced my ears early,in the late 1960’s, using a large sewing needle and a tray of ice cubes to numb the lobes.

It was great family entertainment. Sister, mother, and grandma gathered to watch. No one fainted, and a good time was had by all.

So I came from a streak of rebellion. I got a second set of piercings in my lobes some years ago. Wild stuff. Made family reunions a little tense. Look at her. Four holes!

And now. Well. I was going to hell. I was taking my piercings outside the realm    of all decent folk.

I was going above the lobes.

So Hank and I walked into anAshevilletattoo  parlor (the optimum place to get a professional piercing done, according to the multi-pierced college students at our hometown pub.)

The staff and clientele looked at us as if we might have wandered in by mistake, intending to enter the Oldies But Goodies Vinyl Records Collectibles Shop next door. I explained that I wanted a piercing in each ear.

The young man behind the counter decided to humor me and asked where? I pointed vaguely to my ears. Somewhere in there. And on the edge over there.

This is when he gets out the chart. The ear anatomy chart.

We go over more terms than a high school human physiology class.

Helix, triangular fossa, crus helix, tragus.

Tragus. I ask if that isn’t the time travel thingie in Dr. Who?

Hank sits down in a corner and hides behind his cell phone.

No, the tragus is that thick ridge that guards the entrance to your ear canal.

Okay, that would be a prominent display spot for a glittery semi-precious stud. Very cool.

“I’ve got a pierced tragus. Want to see my tragus?”

I like the sound of that.

On to the other ear. Helix. The outer fold. Soft and fleshy. “That looks like a good spot. Not much cartilage. Won’t hurt, right?”

“Not much,” the child-man behind the counter says.

He said something similar about the tragus.

Actually he said, “Not too bad.”

Next to me, a young child of twenty or so, dotted with a lot of metal already, says, “Hey, you  oughta try this. She points to her ear. Inside, upper half. A stud gleams on a  shallow mound that looks as if it would be very hard to maneuver a needle through. My stomach felt funny. I looked  at the ear chart.

The antihelix.

That sounded . . . anti. Not for me.

I paid, I signed papers, I swore I wasn’t underage, high or drunk, and I showed my driver’s license. I was disappointed when I found out all the pretty studs on display in the jewelry cases were forbidden for a piercing process. I had to go full-titanium pre-sterilized. This was some serious stabby work.

“Come on back here,” said a reincarnation of John Belushi, covered in tattoos and a beard, and wearing inch-wide ear-plugs in his lobes.

This is how men think they’re proving they could give birth if they had to.

John took me into a very doctorly room with sterilizers and cabinets and an exam table with sanitary paper on it. He had nearly twenty years of experience piercing everything that can be pierced on the human body, and when he realized I was happy to hear the gory details, (writers ask questions, and former  newspaper reporters ask a LOT of them) he merrily told me.

I began making a mental list of the anecdotes I would not be sharing with Hank.  A lot of men don’t like hearing stories about needles going through that down there.    

“Ready?” John said, his Latexed fingers holding a needle the size of a toothpick  next to my unsuspecting targus.

“Sure!”

When  your daddy stabbed your earlobes with Mama’s  largest sewing needle while your kid sister went “MAKE IT BLEED,” you’re  confident you can handle a steel toothpick through your targus.

Zap.

I said bad words. My eyes watered. It was over in three seconds. Maybe two. But still. Damn.

“You all right?” John asked.

“Sure!”

I was looking around for something sharp to cut him with if he picked up a second needle. Fortunately, he recognized the reaction. “The other side will be a piece of cake. You’re doing great. Didn’t you say you have a calico cat? Look, here’s a picture of my calico. She sleeps between me and my wife every night.”

He distracted me with photos of his kitty on his cell phone. The dull throbbing in my targus settled down. Okay, it was still attached. I took a deep breath. “Ready.”

“Good girl.”

He moved fast. Ready, set, aim. Ka-zap. My helix lost its virginity. Not so bad. John gave me instructions on saline cleansing. We shook hands. We’d bonded.

I swaggered out like a female pirate. A stud in my targus. A stud in my helix.

“Do I look hot, or what?” I asked Hank.
“Pale, really pale,” he said.
“I need wine. A lot of it.”

He took me by the arm and we wandered out into the sunshine.

Ashevillesurrounded me. I was one with the weirdness. Proudly alternative.

But a little wobbly.

I wanted a Teddy Bear to talk to.

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Coming this winter: a sprawling story of romance, mystery and danger. An isolated North Carolina community is haunted by the massacre of ten prominent families in 1930. Were they vicious bootleggers or the victims of one man’s vengeful greed? A brilliant textile engineer and a disgraced ex-NFL football player must pick up the pieces of a dramatic legacy and defend it against a new generation of revenge.

Excerpt

Caillin Anna MacBride and Sean Liam Gallagher
Eire County, North Carolina
February 1930
The terrible fate about to befall my family and the others of Eire County was woven from a skein of pride as fragile as the mountain skies but as strong as steel chain. For nearly two centuries the ten founding families of our Appalachian paradise had worked, died, loved and lost, celebrated and mourned and, most of all, prospered. Eire County Scots-Irish fought and died as heroes in the Revolutionary War. They built a town, a community, and a proud way of life based on sheep and whiskey.
They were dirt poor when they walked off a ship in Philadelphia in 1735, bringing with them little besides their Presbyterian stubbornness and their heirloom skills from the old country: herding, weaving, needlework, and the making of fine liquor. They journeyed south, into the Southern highlands. They fell in love with the mountains of the colony that would become North Carolina. They established a county and named it Eire, for Ireland.
By the mid-eighteen hundreds Eire County was known for two things: the Little Finn River Whiskey Distillery and fine woven goods from our imported Irish sheep. The distillery sold our libations all over the Southern states. The bottles were beautiful, made of amber glass and stoppered with hand-carved corks. The labels were gloriously ornate, and the names poetic: Old Irish, Ram’s Head, Proud Chief.
Our women supervised vast herds of sheep, ran two wool mills to prepare the fleeces, and imported Peruvian cotton and Asian silk. They employed a network of mountain women who knitted, crocheted and wove Eire County fiber into everything from linens and lace to rugs to socks.
We carried on ancient celtic traditions through their woven patterns—the symbols handed down for generations. Birds, deer, sheep, celtic circles, celtic crosses; each family had its motif. Among our next-door neighbors, the Gallaghers, the heirloom symbol was a bound sheaf of grains; the ribbon around them swirled into itself, unbroken and eternal.
Among my family, the MacBrides, the favorite symbol was the dair, the oak, grand and sheltering, a stylized tree whose pattern took enormous skill to create. Oaks were not just sentimental choices; in the life of a whiskey clan the handmade oak barrels, usually charred just-so on the inside, meant the difference between harsh grain alcohol and bourbon whiskey. The oaks’ charred essence seeped into the new-born liquor and transformed it. A smooth drink needs two years in the oak, our elders said.
We drank from the soul of the oaks. Yes, we timbered them, and harvested their bountiful acorns to feed our sheep and pigs, but we also planted groves of new trees.
In the valley of the Little Finn, where the cold, sweet water flowed across our front pastures like a moat, broad fields of corn grew higher than a man’s head every summer. The corn was milled into flour and grits, but also for stewing as sour mash. On the banks of that pretty mountain river, the Little Finn Distillery spired a handsome bell tower into the sky; it was a grand brick-and-stone structure. When the mash was cooking in the big copper pot stills, a delicious roasted-corn aroma sifted through the valley along with the river’s silver mists.
But now the distillery was empty and shuttered. Our stand against Prohibition had edged us toward a horrifying label as lawbreakers. We hid our handsome stills in the sheep barns and the deep creek hollows. We found lucrative markets for our liquor in the gangsters’ speakeasys—many of them owned by our kin, since we often sent our young men and women to the cities for college, and they often came home with husbands and wives as well as degrees. We partnered with the Spanish mob in Florida to export our whiskey and import their rum. We married into it to seal the deal. My aunt, Maureen MacBride, was now Maureen Esperanza, married to Emil Esperanza, a kingpin of bootlegging in Tampa.
We prospered mightily. Under the houses of the ten founding families of Eire County were buried enough gold coins to run a small country. My grandfather had a personal showpiece collection begun by his great-grandfather in the seventeen hundreds. Even in nineteen thirty there were rare coins in it worth a small fortune each.
Prohibition did not ruin us. In fact, it turned us from modestly rich to very rich. We concluded that doing business with corrupt men was an act of civic rebellion, and would bear no permanent consequences, and that the smooth liquor of ambition was a righteous balm for righteous people. We continued to make liquor, and to weave wool, as if nothing would change.
We forgot that wool does not weep for injustices and bourbon does not mourn for lost souls.