Notes on Scarritt People, Adkins and Hulvey

From the memory pit.

Gary William Adkins. This piece is resurrected from my poetry blog. Having given Adkins time to respond to this information, and having been completely ignored for more than ten years, I feel free to publish whatever I have to say about that time and his role in it.

I was good friends with this guy on and off for a decade. It's amazing though how well you can think you know someone and then realize they have done something you have no understanding of whatsoever. So Adkins was a big part of the Scarritt scene, and long term close friend of Ross Hulvey. He also had sexual relationships with a couple of Scarritt people, Gael Cox and Sandy Riseman. He went to Hollins College in Virginia, after Davidson went there, in the mid 1970s (along with Ross Hulvey, his gradeschool friend). And he wrote the other pretty successful novel ms. from that group, The Horror At Ceal Springs. Along the way he played some banjo music and generally did his best Mark Twain imitation.

I came back to this poem (folk music), which I wrote about four years ago, because it needs work, still needs work though it is better than it was, and because of all the things that happened in my life, the way Adkins simply slipped away confuses me the most of all. He married in 1980 in Virginia, to a woman who apparently was so self-centered and full of her own needs that she couldn't be bothered to actually meet and interact with any of Gary's friends, despite having moved to his hometown from Pennsylvania. Karen. So, right away we are clear on the facts here: He married someone who took control of his life. Later on he came to work for the Illinois School Boards Association where Jessica the witch Weber Billings was the editor. Gary ended up taking over that job, after Jessica escaped to New Mexico.

In some correspondence with Jessica this last year, and that is a story in itself, she told me that Adkins was essentially an alcoholic these days and had broken all social contacts with anyone from that time, including John Knoepfle and more importantly Ross Hulvey. Gary had been very close friends with Ross from approximately the sixth grade, even in the early Karen years, he made time to see Ross. Well, age brings the recognition of your failure and I'm sure that Adkins has retreated to the comfort of his wife and dog. They didn't reproduce because his wife didn't want to. I remember him telling me in the 80s that he was sure Karen would come around on this issue, that she would eventually need to reproduce. But, she didn't. So he didn't ever have the children he talked incessantly about having. Just as well, clearly he couldn't be trusted to always be there.

At one time I really thought Gary Adkins was my best friend. What did I know? Really, not much, eh? I thought Janne loved me. I thought Knoepfle cared about my work. I thought Pat Smith thought I was a true artist. Pretty much none of this was true. Or maybe it was, but it changed. That is more likely, of course.

And some notes on Ross Hulvey, III.

This poem (born twice) is about Ross Hulvey the third. Early in his life, at nineteen, Ross had heart surgery. He had a fabulous scar from this event. He doubted his ability to survive for long, and cultivated a fairly gothic world view, a marked interest in Lovecraft and all things "eldritch".

In his mid-twenties he was suddenly given a clean bill of health and told he might live a long and normal life. At that point there was a remarkable change in him: he gave up his overalls and he shaved his beard. Also he began smoking pot as if there was no tomorrow, having been given ten thousand of them. In the 1970s several of the writers I knew spent time in the graduate writing program at Hollins College in Virginia. Richard Dillard was some sort of old friend of Knoepfle's and John kept sending people over there to write. Ross went with his old friend, Gary Adkins. It was a good deal for them as Hollins is, on the undergraduate side, a girls' school. So there were plenty of available females there.

Naturally, Ross fell deeply in love with a girl named Heidi. Unfortunately her father intervened. Ross was too old for Heidi; he was unsuitable. Well. To be honest, he probably was. There was a long period where Ross got past the emotional devastation of losing Heidi. Part of what helped him through that was a weird relationship with Jessica Weber. Jessica took Ross on, not exactly as a boyfriend, but sort of.

She told me, and I have this written down in an old notebook, that in reality she was out of Ross's league. But she herself had been dumped by a guy who turned out to be dying in his thirties because, he told her, she wasn't special enough to be his last love. I've often wondered if that was why she let Ross hang around for year after year.

In any case, Ross eventually met, had an affair with, and married a girl named Julie who ran a bookstore with her sister-in-law and mother-in-law, Trilogy Books. Of course that came to an end when the partners discovered that she was cheating on their son/brother with Ross. Julie and Ross married after the divorce came through.

Julie had a child from the previous relationship. Ross was really always too selfish to have a child himself. He was a child, himself, in many ways. He was cheap, and selfish to the max. Yet he was also a repository of much fun and weird information. What he wasn't was a writer. In all the time I knew him, fifteen or twenty years, he wrote two or three stories and the mildest beginning of a novel. One of these stories, The Gerber Syndrome (Cosmic Circus), was about a man trying to commit suicide by enacting a crime horrible enough to bring back the death penalty (in the UK where this was set). He settles on stealing an infant and eating that child. After he has done this he realizes he now has something so wonderful to pursue that he wants to go on living. Yes, a weird, grim piece, but darkly funny.

I pointed Ross to a magazine called Cosmic Circus, and sure enough the piece was printed, and eventually reprinted in a best of collection. It is still available today. Google it and you will see. Ross' father died in his early sixties in 1986. Ross himself must be nearing sixty, same as me, now, and I wonder if he is thinking about leaving the world. I know I am. I wonder what it all means. Oh, and Ross, when I knew him, owned maybe 15,000 books, 3,000 records and a 1,000 movies and the hardware to play them all. Lots of odd stuff. There is a discography of the Fugs (Ed Sanders wonderful beatnik rock group) on the net that Ross compiled.

Back to Adkins:

Adkins was depressed about women and about his future. He had hoped to write and publish books, but ended up being a shill for a Springfield lobbying group. It was marrying that girl Karen that took him away from the work. At least it looks so in retrospect. The really sad part of his story is that he always wanted to have children. We always joked that his girlfriends had "wide, childbearing hips," and they did. Karen too. Unfortunately for him she didn't want to have kids. I remember him telling me that she'd change, as the years went by, and she would want some kids. Didn't happen. I hear they have a dog. Well, nothing wrong with that. Still, you wonder what happens to people. I also wonder what he had to do to be one of Jessica the witch's minions. Something, I am sure.

I myself was pretty damned depressed at the time. Still, the piece has a certain gritty desire lingering in it.