I was walking down 21st from the bus stop on Division, heading south toward Powell, plugging away, in close pursuit of my walker, and for some unannounced reason I was reminded of the Atlanta Prison Farm out Key Road. Maybe it was the contrast.
The gardens out on the street, so well rendered with their early indicators of spring and renewal. The reminder of first green, as seen in that most dismal place, the prison farm. The memory of the rolling hill on which sprawled the one-story bunker where we ate and slept in century-old accommodations. So morose inside, a moroseness like the sad winter sky of Portland, but met abruptly at the wide door by fresh air, a high wind and broad sky and green rolling land covered with lush grass for the herd of cows.
Outside. Outside for filling the lungs, and for freedom, a reminder. Maybe it was the lushness of the late February air as I walked, so unexpected, that reminded me of the contradiction of the prison farm. The first time I wound up there.
It was a working farm built on prisoners' labor. A desultory, squat lowering place. And even there, like here on 21st, spring changed everything.
Some of the fellas, old country boys, all big long bones, were right at home on the farm. A lot more than in the city, which was changing so rapidly in the early '80s. Hotlanta was booming and no place for a poor man. The poor stood nothing to benefit or contribute there.
My first acquaintance with Key Road was in the person of an artist. A tall, rangey, disheveled fella, a long-haired relic and fixture from the time when Peachtree between 10th and 14th was where it was happening. "The Strip." He was a product of the nearby art school, now just a sanitized glam affair, but then as human and vital as an art space (Not an institution! but an agora.) could be imagined, and imagination and joy was everything there was and everywhere you looked. The art school spilled creativity and excess. And people like this fella, whose name I can't remember. Does it matter? Didn't back then. He had at one time been integral to an artists' commune on 14th, between Peachtree and Piedmont, living in a wonderful huge old mansion populated with creative expression, an explosion for the senses like an enormous ruddy begonia by the sidewalk.
God, it was such a different time.
By the time I ran into him, he was a drunken, wasted outcast, aging and in the way, tolerated by those who'd known him from when his time was happening and when where he was was where it was at, and practically no one else. The cops knew him well, though. All 6'8" of him. Gangly. Made with sticks and spit.
nnnn
I ran across him one morning as I was walking from the dead building I was sleeping in across from Piedmont Park, headed to the plasma joint to donate and get my beer and food money. Twice a week, every week. Bum the change to get a can of malt liquor, then another, and another, to get sufficiently spiffed to go and get jabbed with that hobnail. Watch all that foamy mess drain out like it was my elan vital, which it was. And I didn't care. That seven bucks was seven I didn't have to panhandle. And there was oblivion at the end of that three hours strapped in. Then, over to the package store where they only charged a quarter to cash the plasma center scrip. And the Country Club 800 right there in the cooler. Where it had been earlier when bumming, a can a trip.
The artist was sprawled out on somebody's lawn. Took up a lot of space. He was well over 6 feet and his arms and legs and long-haired head were strewn about like separate parts. His head was about 10 feet from his feet and his mouth was wide open with his tongue scattered near the sidewalk. A fine specimen of a fella. He woke as I was passing and asked if I had a cigarette. I told him of my circumstances, that I didn't smoke, and asked if he wanted to join me. Free admission. He said he couldn't donate, which I took to mean he had Hep C. I wished him well and moved on. Needed to get there early to get in line. For a certain sort of bottomfeeder, life was becoming more and more broken down into lines. For virtually everything. The bulk of the day was consumed in lines, and walking to and from.
Once, when I ran into him and shared some beer, he said he was 6'8''. I said, "Still?" He said "Yeh, I just spend most of my time folded up." Which was true. He walked bent well over, like his hair, well past his ass even with the ponytail. It was something he carried like a large weight. Sisyphean. Always carrying himself like he was carrying all the weight of the world when most folks by then just saw him as a large object taking up space, and to be avoided or ignored.
Where I had first seen him was where his old lady lived. He used to live inside. Nowadays, she'd just leave him the lawn or, if he reached it before passing out, the swing on the porch. His life, lubricated by wine, had grown disordered. The creative zing had spent. Like his hair, it was in need of a bath. Something new.
I, on t'other hand, was styling. I would, at night, after an evening drinking Country Club 800 (do they still have that stuff?) beside the pond in Piedmont Park, sneak down a narrow alleyway into the side door of this abandoned apartment building where, in fact, when it was still up and lively, I had known some folks. They were students at Georgia State, 10 years before. Good, cheap housing for students preparing for their future; vital energy coursed through the veins of the building when I was first there. (My friend Cathy lived there. She was studying social work, the appeal of which was beyond me - why not just do it, live the life? She went on to UCLA. Very serious with her great, vaguely domesticated TR3. Wind-whipping, grand in the summer sun. Once mailed me a copy of The Great Speckled BIRD with something I had in it and included the note "I knew you'd settle back down again. That you wouldn't just drift forever." Sorry, sister Catherine. The story didn't end where it might have.)
Now the building was boarded up, waiting for condoization like so many old affordable apartment buildings in downtown Atlanta, the gift of the Reagan Revolution. For me in '79, which is when I'm writing of, when I first ran into the artist, it offered a side door I could sneak into to access the empty boiler room with some dirty cardboard spread on the lumpy dirt floor. By summer dark I would have drunk myself into a warm and fuzzy oblivion, and thus besotted with Country Club, I would depart the bench, the same bench each night, where I would seat myself and drink. Indifferent to all the cars cruising and the fellas passin, their low calls, and the occasional cop. Mesmerized by the herringbone light ordering the lake, reflected from the streetlights around me, the water gently agitated by a light summer breeze and ducks fading into and out of my fixed field of vision. My gaze fixed for hours as I tipped the cans of malt liquor, I would dislocate myself from the bench, move from the lake to the alleyway and the hidden door, push it open and slide into the dark within, and I would crash invisible 'til morning came round. In a heap in the empty boiler room. Night after night, An ongoing fix. And all the while my fluids being cheaply drained from me to sustain the alcoholic oblivion. And I didn't care. Each morning I would come to in the boiler room and, barely negotiating my tomb, I would roll away the rock and assume life again just like the day before.
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I reviewed a book at the time for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Dennis McNally, about Kerouac, titled "Desolate Angel." I read and reviewed it while drinking by the lake. I fixated on 'herniated navel and cigarette-burn eyes.' That description seemed so foreign at the time. Somehow romantic, like it depicted a unique awareness, a kind of experience that was new and worth the price of admission.
When years later I happened to be back in Norfolk, I ran across a friend who while attending a medical convention in Atlanta with her husband had read my review. As the world turns, eh? They called the paper to find out how to contact me and no one had any idea. They knew me, they said, as someone who came in for books and to drop off reviews. That was all. They suggested a bookstore but nothing came from that fella either. Looking back, I guess that was all. Difficult to accept what it all amounted to. Like a long time spent in the wilderness inside. Could have just been close to nothing.
It actually wasn't 'til several years later after I'd left Atlanta, then wound up back there and stuck on the street - stepped off the high wire of spiriting highways by then - around '82. When I was part of the sudden army of homeless traipsing Ponce de Leon and Peachtree, that I got my own first dose of Key Road. The last I'd heard of the artist was he'd been fetched up to Key Road, and that was the last anyone heard of him. But, of course, there's a good deal more to it than this.