It started with my long-ago idea of Neckbones. With Tommy’s permission, I did some of our famous local histories through the eyes of skeletons. Knox Mine disaster, Natural Tunnel train wreck. I also messed around with the idea I’d had in my saddest days with Dori: The Incapables, a strip about a junkie couple trying to keep house. The guy was Crash and the girl was Bernie, two teenagers trying to raise themselves. They grilled hot dogs on their car engine while driving around to find their connect, and did household repairs with bongs and roach clips. To the best of my abilities, I made it sad and true to the laughable mess of addicted youth. Also bitter. In one of my strips, Crash is filling his pill-mill scrip and the pharmacy lady leans over to warn him, “This one’s strong, hon. The Purdue rep takes it so he can sleep nights.”
I’m not saying there was a market for any of this. But the days of the big village were just starting. If there’s a shoe out there for every foot, the lonely and oddball foot by means of the internet had a vastly improved chance of finding it. My weird cartoons got a little following that grew, and after a year I sold subscriptions. Not very many. Luckily, I wasn’t in it for the money. One thing I learned from Mr. Armstrong while striving heartily to remain uneducated: a good story doesn’t just copy life, it pushes back on it. It’s why guys like Chartrain wear their clothes too big and their teeth edged with gold, why Mr. Dick puts words on kites and sends them to the sun. It’s why I draw what I draw.
Angus stayed in touch. She followed my comics, which she liked, and sent updates from the Nashville front: college was hard, college kids were a bunch of spoiled brats, and everybody including professors made fun of her mountain accent. She was there on scholarship, and hadn’t understood she was going to be fraternizing with, as she put it, cake eaters and princes of capitalism. Good to see Angus holding on to her winning personality.
She told me what classes she liked, and what nonsense the rich sorority girls were up to, so needy of attention they would pretend it was too hot and take off their jewelry in class. And how certain skeezy teaching assistants were stealth-undressing those girls with their eyes. Nashville she liked, as a town. Dive bars, bookstores, amazing food from countries you’ve not even heard of. Both of us were in Tennessee theoretically, but a half-day’s drive and a couple universes apart. She said in Nashville you could see anybody famous on a given day, Brooks or Dunn, Carrie Underwood etc., because even if not living there, they’re hanging around town waiting to make their albums. She saw Dolly goddamn Parton one time in the grocery store buying head lettuce. I told her the celebrity I saw buying vegetables was Crazy Marv from the “At these prices you’ll know I’ve lost my marbles” used-car commercials.
With Tommy finally living his life, his emails petered out. You had to reckon Sophie was the one getting her ears full now, theorywise. Apart from meetings and my counselors doing their jobs, Angus was the only person anymore to ask what I was going through. How much did I still think about using, how did I keep it together. How’s that wild ride going, was I ready to trust it yet. I told her about the inspirations of black coffee and the deep black bottom I was terrified to hit again. And the pink pill I put under my tongue every morning to keep all the other ones out of there for the rest of my days, so far, so good. I confessed my secret itch to do a comics version of the AA Big Book. I told her about Viking, Gizmo, and Chartrain. On her end, she’d comment on somebody she studied with or partied with, this cat named Jacko she took a trip with over spring break. But no one name ever came to the fore. More often than not, she went home on her school vacations, sometimes going down to stay with Miss Betsy and Mr. Dick. That surprised me, her going back. I thought for sure in a place like Nashville with everybody working their angles hell for leather, Angus would find her people. But it didn’t seem so.
Maggot meanwhile was back in touch, finally ready to forgive me for my brief fit of high school popularity. He thought The Incapables was dead hilarious, and was always sending me ideas that were too third-grade or too adult-raunchy to use. No in-betweens with that guy. He and his mom both had jobs at PetSmart, of all places. He had a boyfriend he met at work. I said congratulations, was he one of those smash-faced bulldogs or what. He said no, skunk breath, he’s the reptiles manager. We were still Demon and Maggot.
My number-one fan though turned out to be Ms. Annie, that now wanted me to call her just Annie. Mr. Armstrong I was supposed to call Lewis. They both put a lot of fan raves on my site, which I could always tell were theirs even though under multiple fake names. They used words like “innovative” and “visionary,” dead giveaway this was teachers, not kids and junkies. Regardless Ms. Annie’s prediction, I was nothing but the lowest level of potato, but you’d think I was the most dazzling success they’d ever had as a student. Lewis was in big trouble with the school board as usual, so the honor you could say was dubious.
What changed everything was Tommy calling me up, out of the blue. The History of our People thing, he hadn’t let go. Maybe homesick. Or having trouble explaining us rednecks to his new family, as you do. Anyway, so excited on the phone he doesn’t start with hello. Demon! I know why we’re the dogshit of America, it’s a war, and it’s been going on the whole time, and nobody gets it, not even us. You have to do a graphic novel about it. This, at three motherfucking o’clock in the goddamn morning. I said I couldn’t wait to hear all about it tomorrow.
Oh, I did. He claimed he was on the right track as far as the two kinds of economy people, land versus money. But not city people against us personally. It’s the ones in charge, like government or what have you. They were always on the side of the money-earning people, and down on the land people, due to various factors Tommy mentioned, monetize this, international banking that. The main one I could understand was that money-earning ones pay taxes. Whereas you can’t collect shit on what people grow and eat on the spot, or the work they swap with their neighbors. That’s like a percent of blood from a turnip. So, the ones in charge started cooking it into everybody’s brains to look down on the land people, saying we are an earlier stage of human, like junior varsity or cavemen. Weird-shaped heads.
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.