Page 116 of Demon Copperhead

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.

Surprisingly, Angus was all over this. I’d been trying to get her interested in comics for an age.

Then in college she discovers graphic novels like she invented them.

Always sending me the latest one she’s crazy about.

Not your run-of-the-mill sci-fi and crime, this girl was into dark.

Jewish mice in the Nazi concentration camps.

Kids growing up in a funeral home. The Incapables, she called fierce.

I’d been telling her this forever, adult comics are all over the map.

But not a single one out there has us in it, she said. Not wrong.

I ended up calling it High Ground. The two-hundred-years war to keep body and soul together on our mountains.

I started putting up chapters on my site as I finished them, earning a weird and intense fan club, part history professors, part good ol’ boys.

Then a guy emailed to say his company published graphic novels and might be interested in mine, could I send him all the material I had.

This guy was in New York. Did he seriously think I was handing over my goods?

I talked to Annie on the phone pretty regularly, but after this news she wanted to see me in person.

A book deal, Christ on a bike, quote unquote.

She would look at everything I had, and help me put together a proposal.

She offered to come to Knoxville. At this point Annie is something like eight months pregnant, if I didn’t mention that.

You turn your back, shit happens. The sensible thing was for me to go to her.

Technically there was no reason I couldn’t.

In three and a half years as a sober living resident, month by month, I’d earned a life without curfew, driving my own wheels, weekends away.

The house managers were actually dropping hints.

Viking was back in Bell County now, and Gizmo was lining up his options.

There was literally no end to the line of guys waiting to get in here.

But I couldn’t imagine going anywhere. Especially back there.

Driving wasn’t the problem, I still had an active license, which the other guys in the house regarded as magical.

They’d all DUI’ed out, many times over, and here’s me without even a moving violation.

I tried to explain Lee County, where all the cops are your relatives or dope boys or both.

I did not have the Impala. My last act before leaving Lee County was to talk Turp Trussell into giving me two hundred dollars for the car and any pills he could find in there.

In less than a month he ran it through a guardrail on that stretch of 421 people call “the hateful section.” Turp was shockingly intact, the Impala, RIP.

Getting this news was like hearing that a childhood dog had to be put down.

But there would be other cars in my life.

From a friend of Chartrain’s mom, I scored an abused but affordable rescue Chevy Beretta, robin’s-egg blue, to celebrate one year sober.

A month or so after that, I got up the nerve to drive it downtown.

A year is a long time away from the wheel.

Straight into city driving, quite the plunge.

I tried to keep my eyes open and channel June Peggot parallel parking outside the Atlanta Starbucks.

I’m in awe of that maneuver to this day. Men have married women for less reason.

So I had a car. I had Annie’s invitation, and my freedom.

Means, motive, and opportunity, as they say on CSI.

Nothing holding me back now but sheer terror.

It’s hard to explain how you can miss a place and want it with all your heart, and be utterly sure it will obliterate you the instant you touch down.

I said this to the counselor I still saw every week, Dr. Andresen, that was part of the house arrangement along with water and utilities.

As far from Miss Barks as they get. Older lady, gray sweaters buttoned to the top, black clog shoes, professional and educated and decently paid I assume.

She was from Denmark, first name of Milka, and for all that, a very likable human.

She’d talked me through a boatload of crap, and honestly it was less distracting to do this with a counselor that you couldn’t remotely imagine doing anything else with.

Dr. Andresen weighed in on the side of me going to Lee County.

Or at least examining my fears. I asked her, what part of obliterate do you not understand?

She gave me the assignment of writing a story, in which Demon goes to Lee County and sees friends who support his sobriety.

What I turned in: “On a planet that exists only in Dr. Andresen’s mind, a good time was had by all, and nobody got shitfaced.

” She gave me her tiny lopsided smile, being used to my attitude on assignments.

Didn’t stop her from giving them to me. Practically from our first meeting, she’d been after me to write a recovery journal.

I told her I don’t write, I draw. She said this would be for myself only.

I could share it, but only if I chose to do so.

The idea being to get clarity and process some of my traumas.

On that particular ball of yarn I didn’t know where to start.

She suggested pinpointing where my struggles had started with substance abuse, abandonment, and so forth.

She said many people find this is a helpful tool for reclaiming their narratives, and in fact wasn’t this what I was doing with my comics?

Whatever. I’ve made any number of false starts with this mess.

You think you know where your own troubles lie, only to stare down the page and realize, no.

Not there. It started earlier. Like these wars going back to George Washington and whiskey.

Or in my case, chapter 1. First, I got myself born.

The worst of the job was up to me. Here we are.