A friend recently loaned me his autographed copy of Chris Offutt's The Same River Twice. The memoir by the Kentucky born writer had long been on my reading list but I'd never gotten around to it - though I have read most of his first release Kentucky Straight. I have no lasting impression of it which, to my way of thinking, says I needed to make space on my hard drive of a mind and it wasn't important enough to keep.
There has been much ado about The Same River Twice by Kentuckians who think it's portrayal of us natives is less than stellar, less than accurate, less than kind. I withheld judgment until I'd read it from cover to cover.
Offutt is from Rowan County - neighbor to my home; Morgan County. I've long thought that Rowan County was....different. When I was in high school, rumors were rampant that devil worshippers sacrificed cats and goats on Clack Mountain - a tall hill near the Morgan/Rowan County line just beyond Cave Run Lake. They said the head warlock was a prof at MSU and that ritual orgies were the nightly norm. Me and friend took a chance and drove around Clack Mountain looking for what we'd been told were satanic symbols leading the way to the ritual site. We found symbols on rocks, painted in red. Clack Mountain was desolate - a dirt road marking the spine of the ridge, more symbols as we went further into the woods, trees started closing in, the road become narrow and pitted with holes where the grader no longer tread; we turned back - considering ourselves brave enough to have gone as far as we did without admitting we were too chicken-shit to go any further...even though we knew full well that anybody who'd heard the rumors was the likely hieroglyph artist.
Still, I never liked Rowan County.
Concerning Offutt's book, the only bit I took exception to was where he says that, if you're a man, porking your cousin, your sister, or a barnyard animal is OK but another man is strictly forbidden. He says it near the bit where he was getting friendly with a NYC hooker, grabbed what he thought was her pistol only to find it to be her hard, throbbing gristle! Freaked him out - as it would anyone, I'm sure.
So, ok, he doesn't agree with gay sex - a lot of people don't. But do they, in Rowan County, really condone sleeping with beasts and relatives long before other men? Is this some mountain guy thing that I somehow missed out on? Does he mean to say that all the boys I dated in high school (which was a LOT) somehow never let it slip that, before our dates, they'd relieved themselves in their nanny goats? That I was in competition with their sisters? That my own father would let me lose in the world and not warn me about such things? I'm sorry - I don't buy it - I think he's full of shit and, that if there is such a pact, it belongs to his family alone rather than some cultural norm. There's nothing normal about it.
I'll grant you this: my dad has told me about a family in Perry County (where he was born) who were well known to inbreed - everyone knew it and looked at them with pity. He said, "They didn't know any better than to not sleep with their sisters." This family was so inbred that deformities were the distinguishing family features, like square jawlines or beady blue eyes in other families. Apparently, you could spot them a mile away, what with their abnormally off-centered noses, distended bodies, and crooked eye sockets. All this to say, normal mountain people, normal people period, do not sleep with their sisters and cousins! And, sorry, inbreeding, where it really does take place, isn't confined to Eastern KY - hello - this country is full of incest, the world is for that matter!
So, I gotta go with his critics on that one - just perpetuating the stereotype, he is. Otherwise, I thought his book was extremely well written and provocative. Though, in all honesty, I felt dirty after reading it. I felt like I had mosquito bites, unshowered, hungry, stinky, sticky, hungover, longing for a bed instead of a floor, a place to belong. Of course, that's the mark of a good writer - you felt everything he went through. But it's not an adventure I'd take again.
For every star he's found, there are thousands of careers he's wrecked along the way (One of the guys from Milli Vanilli - another Clive debacle - killed himself, for example). That's not an exaggeration - I was actually one of the lucky ones - my record got made and put on the market - there were 20+ bands under his purview that same year that never got out of the studio.
With the exception of Sinead O'Connor's track and the last track, title track unfortunately, it's bloody brilliant. I can't stop listening.
Go, now - read about it, then - crank it up or put your headphones on. You won't be sorry.
Posts
