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.

Letter from Gary Adkins, August 14, 1985

Dear Tim:

I was appalled by your last letter, both for its fearful news and its fatalist tone and dreadlock, Congo, bongo, aye! The grocery store heist must have been one of those momentary nightmares, akin to the time the auto careened off 2nd street —in front of the Red Barn eatery—toward you and M. Davidson one carefree afternoon (I remember the hot summer day well); or the time the Channel 20 reporter woke you from another feverish fit of sleep to inform you that a nut was hammering people across the road; or the time you were a passenger in my incindiary Pinto one foggy dewy midnight hour, and we wound up upon the tracks. All incidents worked out OK, but all had the potential for mad disaster in an oddd and unforeseen way. That sort of thing is spooky since you never know, eh?: when you will go around the wrong corner or down the stair into the Big Fear, and it really shows how much faith we all have that we walk around at all, and figure it's all worth the risk. But then, paranoia leads into its own nightmare world, and death is inevitable anyway in every direction we go.

The death of Ross's father was a profound thing for us all, and has changed things in ways that are as yet unclear. Ross is adjusting very well, of course, but is sadder and more motivated about getting his photography business ready ...

***
All the incidents in this missive actually happened. This is from the last correspondence I carried on with Adkins, during the not-quite-a-year that Bradway and self lived on the tenth floor at 112th and Broadway on Manhatten Island. Adkins wrote me in this period, I believe, because he thought there was at least some chance BB or me would get famous and help him get his books published. That is a harsh evaluation, but I think it is ultimately true. After we returned I essentially never heard from him again. He was married to the ultra-shy (clinically shy one might say) girl, Karen, and only Ross Hulvey ever saw him much. That is until Jessica got him a job at the Illinois School Boards Association, where he works to this day. Poor guy.

Gary Davidson and myself were once almost run down by a driverless car that careened off of Second Street as we walked home from Krogers, to Scarritt. Someone else had run into the parked car and launched it our direction. We heard a bang, turned toward the street to see the Toyota headed our way and started running as fast as we could. It didn't quite gain the nearest house, but close. We left the scene.

Later on in the Scarritt years, the young man across the street and on the other side of the alley lost it after five days of hard drugs and took up a hammer and did in a couple of old gentlemen, working on the apartment house he lived in. He headed off in a car to a drugstore that no longer exists where he was disarmed by an elderly man after the man's 8 year old granddaughter was threatened. I was, indeed, awakened by a reporter from Channel 20, seeking the use of my telephone. Yes, children, in those days there were no portable phones in purse or pocket. I answered the door, clad only in jeans, no shirt, no shoes, some service. She was a beautiful african-american woman who was quite familiar to me, but I just couldn't place where I knew her, until she phoned the station. And she didn't tell me what was going on, but the reporter that followed her over, from the State Journal Register, said they were searching all the houses for more bodies. I went up and looked in on Greg Lakebrink, sleeping in the backroom upstairs, just to make sure Bill Sherry hadn't snuck in whilst I slept and done him in, as they say.

Adkins and I, drunk and stoned one winter's night, piled in his Pinto and took off from Scarritt, to go to Krogers for cheap food, only to slide across the third street railroad tracks and become wedged onto the tracks. I went in and called the railroad, pretending to be a neighbor reporting some dumbass had put his car on the tracks. And the police showed up and called a tow truck that pulled Adkin's car back to the safety of the street. Luckily, no train came through that late evening.

Finally, the first incident reported in this missive: When BB and I lived in NYC, on Sunday afternoon we were at a grocery store down the block, on Broadway, waiting to check out. BB said something snide about the person checking us and I told her to be quiet, because I could see that the man standing behind the checkout guy had a gun stuck into his side and the poor guy was just trying to get the money out of the till. The robber had an accomplice and they systematically went through the store's checkouts, taking the money and whacking one guy upside the head. There were about thirty people waiting to checkout. We were all very still and quiet, hoping for it to be over. And, shortly, it was over. The robbers took off and the store started checking us out. I had exact change (this was really just before cash cards so we did a lot of things with actual paper money). As we walked back up the block to our building we saw a police car drive by with the two guys in the back seat. Sunday Afternoon. Gotta love the city.

There was a time when I thought Gary Adkins was my best friend, along with Gary Davidson. Just shows how wrong you can be. I've been told, recently, by Jessica Billings, that Adkins has dropped all of his old friends, including Ross Hulvey. Sandy Riseman once described Ross and Gary as joined at the hip. They were friends from sixth grade on. Now we are all old, having lived through all the odd circumstances, so far.

I intend to keep posting pieces from my large collection of letters. Obviously, if you are still my friend I won't be using your stuff (that means you, Sahib). As for those of you who think I am living in the past, I don't really know if that is true. Mostly just looking at what happened and trying to figure out why. I thought this piece had the ring of the Tarot to it.

Be well. Live with the Lady's love your garment.

Personal Archaeology: Ancient Tales

Re-reading, twenty some years later, a manuscript by someone who I once believed to be one of my best friends. An odd reality. In this novel manuscript many of the characters are based on people I knew in the 70s. At the time I didn't realise that there was no character based on myself. The main characters were fictional personas for Gary A. and his grade school friend, Ross H. Both of whom I spent many hours with in the 70s and 80s and who later abandoned me entirely due to the machinations of another "friend." There was also a major figure in the book based on John Knoepfle, who also used to be an important friend of mine but who also sloughed me off, like used garbage, in 1987.

Yet the book The Horror at Creal Springs, reads well, is very funny, is written with a down home dialect that works well and that is not intrusive. The oddness of the characters contrasts with the essential bourgoise satire of the story. The book uses the Lovecraftian universe, the Cthulu mythos, in a comic fashion. One of the main characters turns out to be a monster, a Shoggoth (using Lovecraft's invention), named Kurt, who initially consumes several townspeople but later turns into a civilized monster, not unlike the Frankenstein monster in Young Frankenstein (Putting on the Ritz). He does retain his monster essence, however, ultimately running for the office of Sheriff. I don't know how hardcore Lovecraft people would really deal with this book, but for the rest of us it is pretty darn funny.

So I am reading this tome, which my friend Lakebrink loaned me while I was in Springfield, (my copy of this book was stolen by a fifteen year old friend in 1981 and taken to Colorado; I spent some years trying to find the kid and get it back, but was unsuccessful) and quite enjoying it, despite the essential betrayals of the author and the other principal characters, and I ended up dreaming about these people. This book called up the vision of that time very strongly in me. Yet, in the dream the people still betrayed me and still judged me as a failure. But, I could tell I didn't care that they thought that. I enjoyed the scene and I knew that I had learned from it. I certainly learned about the true character of friendship. And I learned that fiction is fiction. It is not the truth of the phenomenal world. But it is the truth of the world it creates. As long as it is honest with itself.

The sad story of what happened to these people in the 1980s, doesn't impinge on the joyous sensibility that pervades this book. It was and is true to itself and it stands up after the decades. It is still a shame this book wasn't published. I think it would have quite the cult following if it had. And I know that at least one of the characters out there would certainly have had a better career if it had developed into the cult story that it certainly could have been.

But, the author gave up on selling it and married an insecure younger woman who kept him locked away from the rest of the world, until a witch I know took him under her wing and made him part of her private universe. This is a normal story in a normal world. These things happen to people. We make our choices.

But this lovely artifact remains, brightening my day. I have, somewhere in the vast archive that is my basement, a cassette tape from the Illinois Writers Conference for 1979 that took place in Springfield, which features the author of this book, reading "the Great American Highway Speech," from its pages. In this speech the author contends that the greatest engineering feat in the complete history of mankind is the American interstate system. Although a humorous conceit, there is no doubt that the author himself believes this to be true, and there is no denying his great pride in an American accomplishment. There is a real sense of Sam Clemens in these words. And that other great midwestern writer, Philip Jose Farmer.

And that is the glory of art, that it is a different world than your personal history, or the story of the person/people who created it. If you have the need for proof of the Divine, I say that this by itself shows the true nature of the Universe. That something can be made to live apart from its source. That despite the flaws spread among us all there is beauty and knowledge that is essentially truthful.

No wonder She smiles on us, even in the midst of our eternal fucking-up.