The Emerald Hell

Posted on July 17, 2002 in North Carolina

It’s the old memories that get me — North Carolina, 1980 to 1984. I look back now on Prozac and I feel the sinews pulling on my ribs. I refuse to breathe, maybe so the memories will not hear me as I cringe in my corner.

I am not proud of what I was.

I remember the shocking, alien green of humid summer days, the cheers rounding the corner from the Durham Bulls stadium, the smell of Coors Beers that some fools drove all the way to Oklahoma to buy, and the kudzu that wrestled down the landscape, covering dead and living trees, old cars, rotting slave cabins. How I wish I could forget the mad jungle! I was dirtier, hungrier, and more confused than at any time before or since. I grieved for my father and fought with my family over the telephone and in my head. They didn’t believe that I grieved. I wanted someone to die — it didn’t matter who. Change a factor in an equation and you change the result. I kept my first journals then, but I don’t think I always told the truth. I philosophized a great deal, answered more arguments and described very little. It was a barren time.

A few weeks ago, before I started this weblog, I wrote and rejected this brief passage for use in my fiction project:

“I dreamed of a City of Evil,” said Veronica. “A city built of bricks. Where every brick was made with blood and the people who gave their blood signed their named on every brick.

“Every building was red except for a white tower that was supreme over all the rest. It had eyes staring in four directions and at the top you could see three hieroglyphs in an unknown barbarian tongue. Garish trees surrounded the complex: they regularly turned from yellow to red to candy green. There might have been a fourth color, which was the gray of filthy concrete, but I’m not sure. All I know is that it was an alien place with seasons unknown to me. It wasn’t the chaparral — there were no fires. I suspected that many wicked things were hidden by the trees. The air stank of wood pulp and nicotine. If you tasted the streets, I suspect they’d be sour cinnamon. I hated this city and, yet, it wanted me, insisted that I come to it, live in it, so it could make new bricks with my blood and display my autograph as another of its conquests.

My chaparral, my holy chaparral, covers far more acres in my life and yet it is this emerald island that I remember all too intensely.