Walter is putting the finishing touches on an unsolicited account of a stabbing (apparently one of many) that took place directly in front of his barbershop on Central Avenue in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee. This particular incident occurred some sixty years ago. “Saturday nights. Back then, they was like the Wild West.” Walter sighs nostalgically, seated there in his ancient barber chair whittling a small wooden owl.
It’s 1997. I’m a musician and find myself in Knoxville as the opening act for legendary Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. David and I had been exploring the seedy old downtown area around Gay Street when we came upon Walter’s train wreck of misguided commerce: part barbershop, part thrift store, and, due to the presence of dozens of crudely carved wooden owls of all shape and size that populate the forward area of the shop, part folk-art emporium. The rear of the rundown storefront is crowded with shelves of what appear to be utterly worthless junk.
It’s just Walter and me now. Poor David fled the premises a few moments into our visit after being accused by Walter of conspiring to commit petty theft. Upon entering the shop, in his inimitably quirky fashion, David politely asked the old man if he minded us looking around the back area where “all those cool piles of stuff” lay. Walter scowled slightly then calmly suggested we get the hell out of his establishment, announcing we had a shifty, shoplifting look about us. David Byrne, unaccustomed to such rough handling, thereupon nervously excused himself. (...)
Back to 1994. I was a ruined husk of a human being. My troubles had begun three months before with a badly broken heart, which fate and circumstance parlayed into a conflagration of insomnia, clinical depression, and a raging, untreated infection in my intestines that I would some years later learn was a sometimes fatal condition called peritonitis. I hadn’t slept in weeks. I had no appetite and suffered mysterious, sometimes crippling pains in my gut. I was unwilling to go to the doctor because I had no health insurance and I feared they might put me in some hospital and I’d be bankrupted for life. I guessed there were social services available for people in my situation, but I just didn’t have the wherewithal to run the bureaucratic gauntlet. To make matters worse I was a minimum wage worker who was more than twenty grand in debt. Creditors, having given up any hope of my ever paying my bills, had taken to calling my unsuspecting relatives, harassing them for money. The shame. I lived hand-to-mouth, driving a cab to cover my most immediate bills. Food, lodging.
That was bad enough. But it got worse.
I was increasingly beset by distressing occult signifiers. Every day seemed like a further plunge into some delusional spiral. When my luminously beautiful but deeply troubled girlfriend disappeared without a trace some months back, I frantically searched and searched, but could make no sense of what had become of her. Her apartment appeared abandoned, though the phone line remained connected. I left message after message. No reply. Soon after she vanished, for several days in a row, I found severed chicken feet on my doormat. Black magic of some kind. Then apparitions began to appear on my walls at night — the faces of saints, devils. One day a New York Times crossword puzzle delivered a worrisome message to me about her. The next day there was another. Her name, occasionally in anagram form, sometimes sequentially concise, would appear as answers to clues alongside words like “vanished” and “dissolved.” The crossword messages were infuriatingly abstruse — no real information was communicated — so what was the point, and who, or what, was sending the messages? I felt as though I was losing my mind.
Then a couple months later, I was passing a newsstand and thought I spotted a full-page color photo of her on the cover of the New York Post. Hallucinations occur in extreme cases of sleep deprivation, I knew that much, so was this real? I stopped and stared at her image, then bought the paper. Just to be sure I said to the vendor, “She’s quite a pretty lady, isn’t she?” He winked at me and agreed, “Quite a looker.” He replied.
I read the accompanying article, recounting the story of a small-time, completely unknown theater actress who’d been cast in the starring role of a Disney blockbuster. It was one of those heartwarming rags-to-riches tales. The next day she was on the front page of another paper. Then it was People magazine — they’d named her one of the fifty most beautiful people in the world. After that, wherever I went, whatever I did, I was assaulted by images of her. The Post article reported that she’d recently gotten married. Must have been pretty damn recent, because a scant few months back she claimed to love me and only me.
by Jim White, Radio Silence | Read more:
