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Rockfish Gap Tunnel
Friday, May 17 2002setting: five miles south of Staunton, VirginiaToday Jessika drove her Subaru Brat all the way from Charlottesville to pick me up and take me back with her. She sat for a time with my mother Hoagie and me in the Shaque while my mother prattled on and on about all the things on her mind. I don't usually notice how relentlessly talkative Hoagie is until we have guests visit. My usual reaction is to go into a "torpedo mode," wherein I try to sabotage Hoagie's declarative sentences using various forms of reductio ad absurdum. But for her part, Jessika seemed right at home. She claims that that which spawned her is similarly talkative, and growing up in such an environment probably led to her being an excellent listener.
Since we were so near Staunton, we decided to go for a little walk around the downtown. It turns out that Jessika and her friends make occasional trips to Staunton, though I can't really imagine why. I will agree that it's a much more visually spectacular city than Charlottesville, but even that advantage is in retreat. The city has been barked by a ring road unusually scenery-oblivious even by VDOT standards, and in downtown there seems to be an ongoing effort to Charlottesvillize the place, with new buildings (particularly a new parking structure) done in the hideous faux-Jeffersonian-Classical style.
Walking down Beverly Street with Jessika, I realized for the first time that the vast majority of its stores cater to the substantial market of grandmotherly collectors. Indeed, there's even a store called "Grandma's Bait." Mind you, Jessika likes old stuff; she just doesn't have much interest in macrame bunnies and "God Bless This Christian Home" wall hangings. We did find a store specializing in vintage clothing, giving Jessika the opportunity to purchase a white Greek-style fisherman's cap.
By this point we were hungry, so on a whim we ducked into the somewhat optimistically-named Stock Exchange Deli. It's been in existence for years, but this was the first time I'd ever gone there. For some reason, owing mostly to the name, I'd imagined that it catered mostly to Staunton's small class of politicians and business elite. But once inside, it proved itself to be a most-conventional family-style restaurant, right down to the absence of power-lunch martinis and other alcoholic beverages. The items on the menu, however, did reflect a certain respect for Staunton's many financial institutions, though naming a sandwich after Crestar (a nationwide banking concern with a branch in Staunton) seem inappropriate. I ordered up a hot Italian Sub and it came out dripping with grease, a sight which appealed unexpectedly to my raging hunger. Unfortunately the Stock Exchange Deli lacks a grill and my sandwich made its appearance with a side of potato chips. In a clear demonstration of the Stock Exchange Deli's authentic provinciality, the only other couple in the dining room stared at our table both slackjawed and relentlessly. It was, I dare say, something of a Casey, Iowa redux.
Heading back to Charlottesville, Jessika decided to show me the mouth of an abandoned train tunnel passing through the Blue Ridge Mountain. She pulled over her Subaru Brat where the railroad bridge crosses US-250 before it climbs the mountain and we walked south down the tracks about a half mile, eventually following a side path into the forest. As we neared the tunnel, the climate changed dramatically from hot and humid to cool and clammy. And then, there it was, a tall regal tunnel mouth shaped like a bullet. We continued into it for a short distance until the darkness made our progress too uncertain to continue. Looking up 20 feet over our head at the vintage brickwork, some of which had collapsed in large sections, I feared the consequences of a brick coming loose from the gentle prodding of our conversation. At about this distance into the tunnel someone had spray-painted the words "Abandon hope all ye who enter here." [Later I learned that this tunnel is called the Rockfish Gap Tunnel and many died of cholera during its arduous construction.]
At Jessika's house in Charlottesville, we were eventually joined by Amy Br!ggs (known in the past as "Amy from Memphis"), who has become a good friend of Jessika's during the years of my absence. Amy has an unusual consumes a diet unexpectedly rich in grotesque meat products, though tonight all she was eating was tuna fish and crackers. "It smells like tuna," was all I had to say about that. For my part, I stuck mostly to my bottle of Icehouse.
Later we did the grand tour of the downtown mall, beginning from a base above the mall on the street in front of Amy's house. We were on her porch briefly and she brought out a large moth she recently domesticated. It was in its final egg-laying stage of life, flapping its frayed and tattered wings and shedding little white eggs everywhere. According to Amy, it's one of those moths that has no mouthparts and cannot eat, so it must survive its adulthood on the energy stored up in its larval state. I thought perhaps there might be an alternative, that Amy could administer glucose injections and keep the moth alive indefinitely.
Down on Second Street, in the tiny storefront that once housed the now-prosperous Two Moons Burritos, is Marco and Luca's, another fledgling business, this one specializing in Mongolian-style dumplings. It's operated by a couple, one of whom, Marco, is Mongolian and the other of whom, Luca, is Russian. Their common language, according to Amy, is German, though they've been picking up English rapidly. Amy got an order of meat dumplings and shared them with us. They were chock full of spicy Mongolian goodness, an unusual thing to be found in Charlottesville. I expect big things of this Mongolian dumpling enterprise; every business that has ever operated out of that tiny Second Street space has been blessed with the same sort of grace that looks after fools and Americans.
Even after all these years, the Downtown Mall still has some of the perils of yesteryear, particularly the peril of being recognized by friends and then having to stop and catch up on old times. Mind you, I found myself enjoying the consequences of this peril far more than when I actually lived in Charlottesville (and actually had to avoid walks down the Mall). Randomly, passing Millers, I came across Elizabeth (from the Dynashack), as well as the widely-celebrated unnatural blond Freedom (now accompanied by her several-year-old son). Elizabeth had been living in Harlem, New York City, but after the terrorist attack and the realization that the only career path available to her in New York with a UVA Art degree was Barnes and Noble, she relocated to Charlottesville and resumed her old job as a saleswoman of Asian antiques, a job that she now finds as rewarding as any other one could pursue in this town.
Later, Jessika drove Amy and me to the Tokyo Rose so we could see a band called The Dirty Fingers. Though Amy clearly disliked the band (calling them "raunchy"), Jessika assured me they would provide good entertainment. Wow, it was just like the old days when we went down into the basement. The guy doing handstamps asked Jessika if she wanted to pay, since (being the fixture she is around town), paying for her is an optional exercise of good will. Better still, the guy then asked me if I wanted to pay (a far cry from when I used to draw the Tokyo Rose girl on my hand or sneak in through back door). I insisted on paying, and then on getting a handstamp as well. But it wasn't a stamp that I received, it was an unsolicited slogan instead: "FUCK NYC." I wasn't really sure of the significance; did this mean fuck NYC Osama-stylee?
At the downstairs Tokyo Rose bar, I found myself talking to a guy named Jason who occasionally showed up at Big Fun and played drums. He had a friend with him named George, and George sort of attached himself to me like some sort of social lamprey. He took one look at Jessika and observed (as have many before), "Wow, she sure is hot, is she...?" "Oh, yeah, she's got a boyfriend," I assured him. But he wasn't satisfied with my telling him so eventually he had to ask Jessika herself. But, unfortunately for George, the news hadn't changed. I suppose that if George had been a spectacular specimen of all that Jessika wanted in the male gender (and this is the shred of hope to which George might have been clinging), why then she might have made one little exception, just for tonight. But poor George, there was nothing remarkable about him whatsoever, a fact clearly demonstrated by his desperation.
After the opening punkabilly band, The Dirty Fingers took the stage and rocked with all the raunchiness Amy Br!ggs hated. (By now Amy had taken her leave.) But, to be sure, there was lots more going on then pure raunchiness. The Dirty Fingers had a swaggering in-your-face stage charisma that I rarely encounter in an unknown nobody band. I was particularly struck by the bass player, with his swinging blond anachronistic locks and built-in lower-lip cigarette. But the singer dude, he was also one hell of a piece of work. For his last song, he took the stage wearing a sparkling women's bikini bottom with one of his testicles hanging loose and swinging freely. As that last song ended, the singer hurled his microphone into the crowd and it came to rest near my feet. Dynashack Elizabeth (who happened to be standing next to me at the time) urged me to pocket it. So I did, later hiding it among the spices in Jessika's kitchen.
After the show, I found Jessika talking to her good friend Saras, who is also the girlfriend of The Dirty Fingers' guitarist. Saras had a friend there named Rose, and Rose was all upset that The Dirty Fingers had ended their show so soon. So she tried to rally various people to join her on stage playing The Dirty Fingers' instruments. When I heard her drumming and getting away with it, I was like, what the hell, and jumped up on the stage and grabbed the guitar. Six or seven notes later, The Dirty Fingers' guitarist leapt up behind me and jerked the guitar up over my head in a single furious motion, and it was clear he wasn't happy that I'd been "playing his axe." I apologized for my indiscretion later at the bar, and he asked me how I would have liked it had he grabbed my guitar. "It would depend on how drunk I was," I responded.
Speaking of drunk, Jesus, but by now Saras was totally ripped. She was so fucked up that she was having difficulty walking, though she was still rather conversational. One thing led to another and then she decided to accuse me of being a "homo." I agreed that I was in fact a homo, and that I liked it, above all, up the ass. In her drunken state, this "confession" seemed to intrigue her. She promised, "I'm going to PUMP you up the ass!" For a few minutes after that, she kept saying "pump" with an unexpectedly jovial menace to her voice.
By now we'd moved out to the loading dock in back of the Tokyo Rose and Jessika was having all she could do just to keep Saras from falling backwards over the edge. At about this time, Rose made another appearance and, in another instigative episode, jokingly accused me of calling Saras "a bitch." It was like something out of Total Recall, because this accusation had the effect of implanting a memory in Saras's blacked-out mind of my having actually said such a thing. When she turned to attack me, her boyfriend (already suspicious of my motives from my reckless playing of his guitar) stepped up to investigate. Only then, sensing that her joke was spiraling out of control, did Rose own up to the fact that I'd never accused Saras of being anything.
The dashboard of Jessika's Subaru Brat, looking westward down Stingy Hollow Road from in front of my parents' house.
The back of the Subaru Brat, with its plastic occupants.
Jessika shopping in an antique clothes store on Beverly Street in Staunton.
Jessika in the top floor book section of the Jolly Rogers Haggle Shop in Staunton.
Graffiti on a sign in the Jolly Rogers Haggle Shop stairway.
A prisoner in the Staunton Jail's rooftop exercise pen, overshadowed by a Statue of Justice.
But a few of the spires of Staunton.
Me and Jessika as she drives her Brat eastward down I-64.
The abandoned railroad tunnel under the Blue Ridge.
Two of Jessika's cats. On the left is Chicken, and on the right is Rocky.
A new regular of the Charlottesville Downtown Mall is this guy. He speaks exclusively in a falsetto and makes balloon toys for children. His equipment includes a large assortment of weird robot dolls that move, scream, and wriggle, depending on how they are handled.
Graffiti and anti-tampon signage in the basement bathroom at the Tokyo Rose.
The band that preceded the Dirty Fingers. 
A photo-montage of the Dirty Fingers. Normally you wouldn't be able to see through the vocalist to Josh the drummer.
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