You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s Crazy.
I HATE CITY PEOPLE
The GPS says the trip is 40 minutes out of Nashville. But I know it’s longer than that.
We’re going to Hickman County without a passport, without an invitation, without a real address.
Hickman County is in this century but not of this century.
For some reason, it’s that place that exists only because no one has yet thought to spray it for cockroaches and indecency.
Hickman County is poor and backward and lost in a time warp between 1960 and Van Halen’s 1st album.
The asphalt ends at the interstate. Teeth are optional. Mentality is limited.
Roads are dirt. Dirt roads are rocks. Rock Roads are posted no trespassing. Hickman County is where street signs are hand-written and banged into trees.
We exit the interstate and immediately we are faced with navigational issues.
“Recalculating. Recalculating.”
Suddenly we find ourselves on a dirt road.
I look out the front windshield and wonder how a dirt road can become a dirt road so fast.
“Aren’t we still in America?” I ask my bewildered cameraman at the wheel. “When did we drive to a Nicaraguan Ebola village?”
He smiles, but he is nervous. He is from the inner city and the country makes him uncomfortable.
I look in the side view mirror. Dust is spitting up behind us blotting out what little sunshine I can see through the ever thickening forest growing up on both sides of our marked news vehicle.
“Is this right?” My photographer says, having never traveled back in time before.
I hear the crunch of gravel under the tires. Bang. Smack. Bonk. Good sized rocks are being whipped into the metallic wheel well.
“I know it’s crazy. But this is the road,” I say understanding his confusion. “It’s Hickman County,” is all I can say to assuage his tension.
We drive down a road that could double as a long driveway.
We are driving at 15 mph. The little blue dot on my GPS is barely moving in my smart phone. It’s lost as the people who live here.
I notice a hand painted sign: Demon Creek . It is posted above a warning sign: Trespassers will be shot. No hunting.
“You sure this is a road? It feels like we’re driving on someone’s property” my photographer says uneasily.
I smile weakly, trying to reassure him that this is normal.
But it’s spooky.
We are deep in a forest. I swear I can hear banjos playing above the sound of crunching gravel. The woods are thick and the road is narrowing. I look for wild boars and snipers in tree stands.
Is that a howler monkey? I wonder to myself.
The road is growing dark as the canopy above us blots out the setting sun.
“Great place to dump a body,” I say.
“Hopefully not ours,” the photog says pushing slowly forward.
“Why are we here again?” I muse.
We both know the answer to that. It’s NEWS of the day. We are looking for the home of a pregnant woman who just bonded out of jail on Methamphetamine charges.
Many people are angry at the court, at the District Attorney for reducing her bond and endangering the woman’s unborn child. She has admitted to arresting officers that she is addicted and needs help. Jail would have at least prevented her from smoking meth, given her unborn child a chance to live.
Then they gave her a get-out-of-jail-free card. Why? Why would someone authorize a bond reduction from $127,000 to $2,500 dollars to a self admitted meth momma?
I’m going to ask her, if we ever find a road that actually leads to the address listed on the police report.
Right now, getting to that location is harder than playing lead guitar with oven mitts. Our GPS is spinning like a mad hatter at a tea party.
I can’t blame my GPS. How can satellites 100 miles up possibly know we are driving in either a shallow grave or a dry creek bed. Does NASA understand that Hickman County shares a single cell tower? Does Google realize that snail mail is still the prefered method for communication among citizens who can write and afford pens.
We are like Magellan, driving forward, nervously, optimistically, hoping the road doesn’t just end and we drive into an abyss never to be found.
I keep showing my photographer the blue flag which represents the woman’s alleged home. I keep pointing out the blue circle which represents our news car. Strangely, we keep driving circuitously, never seemingly getting any closer. This is disconcerting, but I don’t reveal my fears.
We come over a crest in the hill. As we head up, our windshield filled with darkening sky and a periphery of pines, I wonder how my life will end.
I see the moon emerging in the darkening hue.
Will I die a good death? I wonder. Will it be a respectable NEWS end where school kids get the day off each year in my honor? Or will I cry like a little girl as some banjo toting mountain man tells me I have a mighty pretty mouth.
We get to the apex of this little hill and begin downward.
Suddenly the windshield is filled with a decision.
The road forks. To the left death and narrowing nothingness. Vegetation and rocks and a steep drop off. There is a driveway and a sign that says DO NOT ENTER.
To the right? Basically the same thing, without the sign.
“Go right,” I say.
My photographer, the inner city man who didn’t realize he might die today, has both hands on the wheel. He looks like the illustration for 10-2 in the driver’s handbook.
“Pick your poison,” I say.
My photog veers right and slowly creeps down a hill. The road is rocky, the road is narrow, with shrubs quickly filling our view. He applies the brakes, but I feel the rubber rolling over a thousand slimy stones. The car slips, slightly out of control till the tires find a patch of dirt to grip.
We travel a 10 yards.
The GPS indicates we should drive forward, about another mile, and we will arrive at our destination.
But that will never happen.
We pull up to a rusty red gate that is across this stretch of dirt path.
Beyond the gate we see a creek and a washed out bridge.
The imaginary blue lines on my smart phone continues. The real road is a dead-end where dreams are shattered and fear becomes more palpable.
“Recalculating.” I say jokingly trying to ease the tension in my inner city partner’s mind.
I look out my window. The tires are clinging perilously to the side of a steep drop off.
“Be careful,” I say, not sure what our next move is.
“Someone’s coming,” he says.
Those are words I neither expect nor want to hear.
I look in my side view mirror. I see dust and the sun is setting in my reflection.
All I can see is pending armageddon.
“You sure?”
“He’s coming up on my side,” He says.
“That’s strange,” I counter in a tone that doesn’t reveal my testes have shriveled slightly.
We both sit and wait. We are boxed in. We cannot back up for fear of falling off the cliff. We cannot go forward because of the thick metal gate.
This is classic medieval strategy. This is how Mel Gibson, a face full of blood and blue paint would fight his enemy. He would guide him into the slaughter-house then lop off his head like a cow whose future is a warm Bernaise sauce in Don Shula’s Steak House.
Before I can share my cinematic vision, my photographer lowers his window.
Suddenly a white man’s face appears. His features are dark, part dirt and part scraggly beard. His eyes are hollow and reveal little. He is wearing a dirty t-shirt and jeans. His shaved head has beads of perspiration.
I look for an ax or syringe.
He stares right at me. He looks demented, twisted. I am sure he has killed before.
“People get shot down here,” he says with no emotion.
I am shocked by this statement.
He is hard and stern. If this was a poker game he just went all in without so much as an introduction.
I am scared, and feel vulnerable. Though we are in a car, we are seated, lower than he is. He has the strategic advantage, standing over us.
If he has a gun, how hard would it be to produce it, and put two slugs into two stupid, news guys.
We’d die before we knew we were shot. They’d find us belted in, a smatter of blood filling the cockpit of the little news vehicle whose engine was still running.
“Where were they going?” the sheriff would ask his deputies who wear blue jeans because the budget doesn’t allow for pants too. Sheriff’s departments that wear blue jeans don’t solve homicides.
My photographer’s breathing has quickened. If there is anything a black man fears, it’s a country boy with no teeth, banjo music and crazy percolating in the air.
You bluffing us you toothless deer hump?, I think to myself.
I stare at the pasty faced mountain perp.
I summon up a throatful of bluff.
“Nobody’s getting shot today, sir.,” my aggressive words meet his sinister introduction like a mixed martial arts head slap.
My eyes feel like lasers as I stare into his face. We are two junk yard dogs playing an optical game of chicken. I am silently letting him know I might be wearing a tie, but I have a sizable amount of NEWS hate working and I don’t plan to die today.
The moment is tense. I imagine Mel Gibson on an ancient battle field screaming “FREEDOM!”
I smell fear in my cameraman. Perhaps he just shit himself.
The mountain killer makes a guttural sound that seems primal, like a coyote about to mate or take down a squirrel.
“Oh yeah,” he retorts.
His words are simple, like his mind. That can be good or that can spell disaster.
How I respond next could be the difference between getting a W-2 next year or ending up as the number one google search: REPORTER KILLED IN 3RD WORLD AMERICAN COUNTY.
“You’re not shooting us? So nobody’s dyeing today.”
He raises an eye brow. I remain smile free.
Poker is a game of subduing emotions. It’s an exercise in hiding your real feelings. He has to believe I am confident, cocky, sure in my words and actions.
I am staring into the belly of the beast. You don’t show fear. You let him know that you will not accept death. You don’t plan to die in the front seat of a news vehicle like a squirrel.
He smiles an evil smile. I notice black around his gums. Is it chewing tobacco or is dental decay from a lifetime of floss inadequacy and heavy metals in the well water?
He slowly moves his right hand. It is below the horizon of the driver’s window.
Is he going for the revolver in his pocket? Does he have a butcher’s knife he just sharpened on a grindstone in his barn?
His hand comes into vision as he pulls up the sleeve on his short sleeve shirt. It reveals a dark tatoo that was forged with Vietnam Napalm.
I focus on the blurry blue ink that suggests U.S.M.C. on his skin.
He sneers as if this means something.
“United States Marine Corps?,” I say with cold bile in my voice. “So that means you’re one of the good guys right?”
I stare at him like he is Andy Dimarsico and my balls still ache.
I summon the hate I felt on that day. I feel my balls bursting with pain and swelling on the ground tightening in my little boy jockey underpants.
I feel the embarrassment of Cathy Byrnes standing over me, her long blond hair flowing in a moment of silent ridicule.
I consider attacking him 1st. I strategically think about going over the center console. I will have to squeeze through the tiny window and push-off my frightened photographers body and launch myself like a small dirt devil onto this unwashed cretin. It is possible, but everything would have to go perfectly.
I feel rage and hatred and America swirling in my loins.
This is it. 3 men. One road. One situation. One blocked out bridge. Cathy Byrnes’ rejection.
I’m gonna tear this mountain man a new asshole and I’m gonna tie him to the bridge-out sign with my tie.
I dare him to say anything, I want to chew on his dirty skin and make Mel Gibson proud.
FREEDOM!
“Yeah I served,” he said, the good part of his soul somehow conquering his demented urge to kill.
“This is private property. What are you doing here?”
I’m breathing fast. My adrenaline is filling all the my body cavities.
“We had some time to kill and thought we’d drive to this washed out bridge in the middle of 1966.”
As soon as these wise ass words leave my lips, I know they are dumb.
My photog eye balls me with a silent “Why would you provoke him?”
I hear the mountain man growl. It is in his throat. It is in a deep dark place that only killers and farm animals know.
“God damned City people.”
His words are caustic. They are bleach to bacteria. They are baking soda to vinegar.
I sense a chance to calm this festering moment before it gets more intense.
“We are on a story and took a wrong turn. My GPS told us to continue down this road.”
“GPS don’t work here,” he says cutting me off.
“I realized that when we ran into the gate that says bridge out,” I quickly counter trying to wash the image of a scornful Cathy Byrnes from my thoughts.
“This is my family’s property,” he says with a sense of law and order returning to his thought process.
“We didn’t mean to intrude, to get lost here, sir. We’ll back up and get out.”
“What you all doing up here?”
The question bothers me. It’s none of his business. What if he is kin to the meth momma. Everyone here is someone’s cousin or illegitimate son. What then? Will he blow our heads off to protect her?
Play dumb, I think. Get out safe. “Just working on a story,” I say revealing nothing.
His eyes fill with rage. Something happened in the jungles of Vietnam a long time ago. He did things, saw things no man should experience.
His mind is now a spider web of confusion, lost between the laws of man and the laws of dark survival.
“We’re going to back up now,” I say affirmatively feeling cornered like a rat at the end of the maze.
He steps back. It’s an awkward moment. He stares into our vehicle. Is he going to pull his weapon? Is he going to do something else unexpected.
“Be careful. It’s a long drop if your wheels get off the road.”
I see my photographer breathe for the 1st time in 2 minutes.
“Thanks,” he says to nobody in particular, putting the vehicle in reverse and releasing his 3 atmosphere pressure on the brake.
“Slow,” The mountain killer says with a grrrrr in his voice.
The car begins to slowly roll.
“Let’s get out of here man,” my photog says anxiously.
I feel his tension as we slowly back up. I know he wants to punch it, but he stays calm.
I look for the mountain man. He has vanished.
“Where’s the crazy guy?,” I ask.
I check my side view mirror. I see a bright setting sun and dust and hill. The maniacal man with the USMC tattoo is MIA.
My photographer gets to the fork in the road. He does an 18 point turn. Back and forth and back and forth.
Finally we are heading in the direction we came.
We begin motoring up the small dirt hill.
With every yard we move forward we both feel a bit of relief.
“That was off the chart weird,” I say. “That mountain man wanted to skin us and hang us in the barn and make us News Jerky.”
We begin driving forward. We crest the small hill and suddenly, there he is, in the middle of the dirt road.
“What the …”
My photog applies the brakes, stopping a yard short of the mountain man’s shins.
The sun is behind him, creating an ominous silhouette. I can see his hand is outstretched, pointing at us. He is dark, surrounded by an eerie blister of sunset. I cannot tell if he is holding anything. I cannot see his face to gauge his unpredictable mood.
He is silent, calm, like a statue. He stares at us. We stare at him.
“What does he want?,” my photog asks.
“Maybe to kill us,” I say with a smile.
My photog casts an uneasy eye.
The mountain man moves to my side of the car. I can see his face. It has somehow softened.
I roll down my window and he crouches.
“you with the news?” he says, looking at our car with a big 2 on the side.
I smile.
“I’ve been having problems with the V.A. Can’t get my benefits.”
He will continue to blather on about what he needs, and how he has been screwed and his family needs the help.
He suddenly becomes less monster like and more like everyone else. He is a man who needs, who has a story to tell, who thinks I can somehow champion his cause.
I am polite as I listen. His words rain down upon me, but my thoughts are filled with a man who threatened to shoot us, who we thought might shoot us.
News takes you to many places.
Today it took us to a shallow grave in a postal zone that can only be described as crazy.
Life’s Crazy