The devil you know

When I was thirteen years old I watched somebody get shot point blank in the face. Their head snapped back, their body tottered slowly towards the ground like a chopped tree. Their lifeless body sprawled out in the parking lot outside the arcade before me and all of the other kids who had come outside to watch what we presumed was going to be a fight. The killer was sixteen years old. He ran. Later, as the crowd of onlookers had swelled to maybe a hundred people, the killer reappeared among us, trying to blend in, pretending to wonder what all the commotion was. Someone recognized him and told the police. The police grabbed him and threw him across the hood of my grandmother's car. She had just arrived to pick me up. She screamed. The killer didn't react. He lay on the hood as the police put the cuffs on him, his head turned towards my grandmother, his face a blank slate. He didn't resist. He seemed at peace, resigned to what was now happening to him. I couldn't take my eyes off of him. What could possibly lurk beneath those hollow eyes, behind that pallid expression, that could make this boy not much bigger than myself go off and do a thing like that? What was his life like that delivered him to that moment?

"Boy, I'll tell you what," my grandmother said as we pulled out of the parking lot on our way home. "You ain't never comin' back to Aladdin's goddamn Castle."

My wife is a New Yorker and she's always wondered why it seems that I know so many people who have died, and stranger still, so many who have actually killed someone. I've always told her that part of being from a small town means you know everyone, which means if someone gets murdered then you probably knew them and you probably knew the ones who did it, too. That answer always satisfied us both, but lately as I've been working on this book I've wondered if it really tells the whole story.

One thing I've been doing this year is trying to read my way through as many southern gothic novels as I can. It's been a difficult project, and periodically I've had to take a break from it to read something light or hopeful or upbeat. The southern gothic tradition is full of violence, sometimes incredibly brutal, and often without any sentiment or resolution. So many southern writers have used violence in their work to show a south that was in serious pain, suffering from poverty, racism, and all manner of moral deficiency. This same south went to great lengths to hide these failures behind over-the-top social mores that southern gothic writers ridiculed and stripped away.

My book isn't a work of fiction, but the various scenes are falling together like the scenes of a novel or a movie, and without much effort on my part the tropes of the southern gothic novel keep materializing. The punctuation marks in Hazel's life story are things like men beating her, men shooting at her, men flinging themselves from bridges to their death. Hell, there's even snake handling Pentecostal preachers trying to save her and carnival con men sweeping her off her feet. The more stories I hear the more I worry people will assume I'm making it all up.

But this is real shit. And furthermore, this is the kind of real shit that makes up a life lived out on the margins. Poverty in small town southern America just begets this kind of violent, crazy stuff. That isn't to say that everyone that lives in poverty lives among insanity and violence. It's just to say that I understand why, to anyone who has been able to live at arms length or farther from real poverty, stuff like this seems like fiction.

I was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas about a decade after the gambling business cratered and grew up during the period of time that Hot Springs was really struggling to figure out how to keep its head above water with the loss of its most important industry. It was a rough time. Maybe a year or two before the end of gambling in Hot Springs there was a huge hotel boom. Millions of dollars were spent on massive luxury resorts that would accommodate the two million visitors a year that came to this little town. Some of them didn't even open until after the last casino closed its doors. I grew up as Hot Springs came crumbling down, a long and painful process that saw extravagant, elegant hotels converted into subsidized housing for senior citizens or simply left empty and abandoned right in the middle of town. The amusement park closed down and kudzu grew all over the roller coaster. The Southern Club, one of the most storied casinos in the American South, became a wax museum. The Vapors became a church.

More importantly than the fate of all the beautiful buildings, many of the people of Hot Springs lost their livelihoods. The economy shifted under everyone's feet like an earthquake. The houses we all lived in lost their value. Downtown Hot Springs, once a beacon of nightlife and culture that attracted visitors from around the world, became a scary place to go at night. There were seven strip clubs in a city with fewer than 30,000 people. Factories closed down. The K-Mart closed down. The dairy went out of business. The city schools got smaller and smaller, poorer and poorer. The main thoroughfare grew into a tour of empty businesses. People told their kids that if they had any sense they'd get the hell out of Hot Springs as soon as they could and go make themselves some money somewhere else.

From the time I saw that boy get shot in the face until the day I left Hot Springs for good, I knew four different kids who got locked up for murder. A couple of them were just nuts. One of them helped a kid kill his parents for money to fix his truck. Another one had slept over at our house a few nights before he killed someone with a baseball bat. He was 15 years old. It got so it seemed like normal life. Only through the eyes of other people did I start to see how fucked up it all was.

Now that I live here I can see Hot Springs through the eyes of my wife and kids. I can see things that are incongruous, odd, inexplicable, that I have taken as normal for so much of my life. I have to explain the massive, empty buildings all over town, or why the schools aren't off for Martin Luther King, Jr Day, or why none of the other kids in Adeline's class drew dads on their family portraits.

But here's the good news. Though it may still be weird, Hot Springs isn't the same place I grew up. Downtown isn't scary anymore. In fact, it's probably the most lively part of the city, with people moving there and new businesses thriving. There are crowds on the street downtown until late into the wee hours of the morning on weekends, crawling the bars and restaurants and hotels and having a grand old time. There are young artists and professionals and intellectuals living here, working here, raising families here. And the community is working together to continue to build Hot Springs back into the kind of place that can welcome millions of visitors and attract thousands of new families as it did in its heyday. The amusement park reopened and expanded. There are new high rise hotels springing up in place of the old and empty ones. In a couple of weeks we will vote on a tax increase that will create over $50 million in revenue for the city schools, a district that has been absolutely decimated by several decades of despicable racist white flight. If it passes, they will build schools that will be the envy of the entire state and turn the tide away from white flight and bring families back across the line, back into the heart of the city again.

Everyone we meet in Hot Springs tells us the story about when they first came here to visit, how they fell in love with not only the city's unique and quirky character, but also the city's potential to become something great. They tell us about how they realized there was a place for them here, and how they could do something cool in Hot Springs they couldn't do anywhere else. The thing that strikes me about all of these conversations I keep having is that these people aren't from here. They missed those dark days. There are a lot of folks who expatriated here from somewhere else, saw the city with fresh eyes, and set to digging in the dirt to excavate something new and beautiful. Their project is ongoing. I'm happy to bear witness to it even for a short time.

Despite all of this, there still remains poverty, violence, the jagged edges of the fringe on all sides of us. Flannery O'Connor once wrote: There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration.

Last night two young men opened fire on a car full of people a couple of blocks from my mother's house, shooting five people. One of the shooters remains at large. I say this not to be alarming, just as I didn't tell you about this city's beautiful people to be cloying. I'm telling you this because we can't tell a nice story and erase the evil. You can fight it by attacking its root causes, by trying to build a community that celebrates the absence of it, by rejecting Satan and all his works. Still the devil lurks there beneath the hollow eyes of evil men. He's down here in Hot Springs and he's up there in New York City. The only difference is here he's closer, more familiar. They say better the devil you know than the devil you don't. And in Hot Springs, Arkansas, there's hardly any devils everybody don't already know.

Sleep tight,

David