Excerpts on Asheville, NC

parts of an essay I began a year ago on my old home town

This is the beginning, and various parts, of an essay I began writing a year ago about my time living in the city of Asheville. The writing is unpolished, and ultimately I decided that I had to lock it away for awhile until I got the inspiration to work on it again. Initially, it was going to be an essay, well really, about me, only using the framework of the city and my time driving for Uber and Lyft around it, to pry deeper into a very formative part of my life. But I wanted to share a bit of the magic of Asheville in light of the flooding and devastation occurring there now. So here are bits and pieces of my old home. If you wish to help out, here is a good link. So here it is:

Asheville:

The city of Asheville has a distinctive quality of seeming like a city that is yours while seeming not yours. It grants you moments of intense intimacy, then withdraws or forbids. It’s contradictory. A mountain hippie enclave in the bible belt. Artsy but traditional. An admixture of hipster culture and the stubborn, rugged individualism of mountain folk. The young knock-abouts that have visited and stayed, and the old, Scots-Irish families that have kept home and hearth for generations. Jam band and Old Time music that blends into the other from block to block almost seamlessly. The first person that I remember having a conversation with after I arrived was a young bi-racial woman with delicate curls, wearing a flowery yellow dress. She floated on air as she approached me as I read on the Double Decker Coffee Bus, and apropos of nothing, said, “you know they call Asheville the Paris of the South.”

Whenever a friend or family member came to visit, I felt compelled to reveal all the excitement the city had to offer, as though I was expressing something deeply personal. Together we would trace the streets of downtown, amidst the bustling crowds, the bachelor parties spilling out of breweries, the couples on patios cutting into chicken fried steak and eating honeyed biscuits and scooping collards onto their forks, the uber cars unloading families only to then round the corner for another pick up, the banjoists and the guitarists and Abby the Spoon Lady busking the corners with her band, the protests at the Vance Monument, the Lazoom bus tour mascot dressed as a nun on a bike honking his rubber horn as he sails downhill Lexington, the crowd swelling in Pritchard park come to watch the drum circle and some overcoming their inhibitions to dance chaotically within it, the shop-dwellers, the vagabonds with their backpacks crusted with dirt sitting against the walls of parking garages with their dogs laying lazily at their feet,—amidst all this—and feel electric with a sense of possibility. Okay, what next? And where to? I once read, while sitting on a bench by the Haywood Hotel, that Gershwin had composed portions of Rhapsody in Blue, the great kaleidoscopic epic of the American city, while staying at the Grove Park in Asheville. I’ve never been able to find anything remotely suggesting this since, yet it still rings irresistibly true to me. One time, when showing my father around, I could hear him gently humming it along the tour.

                There are other times when the Dionysian tableau of the city feels entirely closed off, not meant for you who live there. The streets begin to feel choked with out-of-towners and trust-fund kids, all of them affluent, and afforded much more leisure time. And you, who must stay afloat, have to work. Asheville being a tourist haven and therefore a “service-industry” town, often this work takes the form of facilitating the travel and good times of others. The cost of living is the highest in the state of North Carolina. The wages are low. In his novel Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino writes of Sophronia, a city that is composed of two half-cities. One features a Ferris wheel, a roller coaster, a carousel, among various other novelties. The other, the slaughterhouse, the churches, the banks and factories. Every year, one half packs up and travels to the next spot on their itinerary. And so the banks, the factories, and the churches are loaded brick by brick into trucks and shipped off.

                Many people that I befriended in my 11 years living in Asheville have since moved away. I used to joke that it sort of functions as the triple A team for Portland, or Austin, or Seattle, priming its inhabitants for the major leagues. Really, it was more the lack of opportunity that drove these people off, and on another level, I can only gather, a feeling of dispossession. They no longer felt like the city was theirs. Infinite possibility was replaced with a sense of stagnation. It’s one thing to be living with roommates at 25, waiting tables without health insurance. It’s quite a different thing at 40. At some point you have to plan for the hustle to run out in you. You maintain it while you can. And meanwhile the tourists keep coming. New restaurants open, new breweries emerge, and the buskers eventually switch over, the old regulars having gone on to Nashville or Charleston. The purple buses, giving comedy tours of the city’s history to laughing and drinking families, are still ubiquitous on the streets. It’s not unusual to see the locals that walk the sidewalks as the buses crawl past, good-naturedly flip them off. In fact, it seemed almost as if built into the tour.

Among the many jobs that temporarily kept me afloat in Asheville—managing a clothing store, night cleaning at a college campus, bartending, distilling, a few writing contracts--by far the most pleasurable was driving rideshare.  Of course, it wasn’t a luxurious gig and didn’t open any avenues to future endeavors, but I got to listen to my own music and, besides a few petulant drunks—very few, surprisingly--everyone was amicable. And then there were the views. Solving the tortuously patchwork mountain side streets of some unknown neighborhood on the way to a pickup, the Hickory trees would briefly clear, revealing the city center below. The train tracks bisecting the River Arts District with all its studios. The rooftop bars. The terra-cotta cupola of the City Hall building. The Jackson building, a sliver of a façade that holds the record for tallest building in the smallest lot. The basilica. Pack Square Park. The stone obelisk. Behind all this, wave upon wave of grey-blue hills, soft and feminine (as opposed to the rugged masculinity of the Rockies), and among the waves, Mount Pisgah, the largest peak on the western side, crowned with a broadcast tower, like an upturned pushpin in the distance, barely piercing the sky.

Separate section:

They are walking in the distance, trailed by the rolling luggage that bounces as they drag it on the gravel. I take a moment and smoke one of the stress cigarettes from the pack I keep in the glove compartment. I’m outside leaning up against the passenger side door where I can see the view off the mountain. I never smoke inside the car. It’s bad for business. Also, like my friend Gil told me when I bought it, “you keep the car new for as long as you can. Every ding it gets, every unwanted smell…you lose a little love for it.” I feel the cool, thin, mountain air. The view out here is incredible, up in the clouds. You can see miles away. Long thin roads with cars making their way to and from work, like those old medical videos you see of cells rushing though the bloodstream. Rivers and lakes. Rural houses that people live and die in.  

                It’s an hour and half back to town and it’s already 7:30. Along the way, imagining the ferment of downtown on a Saturday night, I resolve to take the rest of the night off. I’ll make up for the loss of the income later. I remember myself as a child, the youngest of 4 siblings. Whenever I was in bed, I would stay up listening to the rest of the family downstairs and feel I was being deprived of something essential, like I was cut off from the world. I’ll get a beer or two or three. The best breweries will be packed wall to wall. Wicked Weed will have a line around the block, so that’s out of the question. But it’s okay. I’ll find a spot. Possibly one with front patio seating where I can watch everyone pass by. If not, I’ll go to Broadways, where they don’t allow new memberships on the weekend, and therefore greatly curtail the influx of out-of-towners. I often wind up there when the rest of downtown is alight.

Bele Chere:

Bele Chere was a bombshell of tourists that dropped on Asheville every June. At the same time, it managed to capture the celebrated weirdness of the city’s populace at its most distillate. Over 300,000 patrons walked the streets, drinking beers, eating food from vendors, and listening to the local music played on the corners. The largest free festival in the southeast. The city would shut down all traffic flowing into downtown, and all along the streets would be vendors of arts and crafts, paintings, gemstones, home goods, and the like. There would be people on stilts, tarot card readers, placid Hare Krishnas in robes peddling copies of the Bhagavad Gita, hula hoopers, and legions of people who had had far too many beers.

I would walk 10 minutes to downtown, buy a $2 bracelet for drinking, and then promptly exit the festival to the nearest grocery store and buy a 12 pack and stuff it in my backpack to avoid the vendor prices. Back at the festival I could have the entertainment and go the rest of the day and night without spending a thing, drinking at any available space where I could sit down.

The first Bele Chere, I sat mostly in areas where I could gawk at the spectacle of zealot Christians protesting. Families who had traveled together to yell in microphones on the corners (Asheville was callously deemed a “cesspool of sin” that year by a NC state senator, presumably for its pro-LGBT policies and businesses), wearing sandwich boards, and holding up wide, neon-colored signs condemning the decadence of everyone around with bible verses, and especially ridiculing homosexuality. It was their version of a vacation. Large groups of festival goers would stand around in a circle watching the scene unfold. Counter-protests erupted, chants of “go back home.” I stood filming with my phone to show my friends back in Rochester. More than a decade later I would rediscover the old phone in a storage box while I was preparing to move. Rewatching the videos I’ll see the 15-year-old version of Sylvan, a regular at the bar I tended many years after the first Bele Chere, shouting at the zealots.

The festival died out that first night at around 11pm. The drum circles had long dissipated. The vendors’ tents were closed, but a few bars remained open. The pedestrians on the street became more erratic. I ran into people still on their acid or mushroom trip, talking to me in frequencies I couldn’t tune into. End of the world stuff. A couple of them mentioned the Mayan Calendar while staring at me meaningfully. I walked to The Southern and ordered Chicken and Waffles (they did theirs with shredded chicken in a vegetable gravy) off their late-night menu. Then I made my way to the east part of town and drunkenly walked up the steep road to the apartment complex.

This was the 3^rd to last Bele Chere Festival. The city council would look at the books several years later and recognize that it costs as much money for the government to put on as it makes for the businesses in the area. Many of the vendors also came from outside of Western North Carolina, and so the money wasn’t necessarily being filtered back into the community. New businesses were being opened downtown, new hotels especially. Closing off the roads seemed less and less plausible. The council unanimously voted to end it.

Biltmore Village:

The Biltmore Estate is a peculiarity of Asheville. When you envision it in your head, it feels like something that should be on the outskirts. In reality, it’s less than 5 minutes south of downtown. The buildings of the village outside of it, originally built to house and tend to its workers, are uniformly stuccoed pebbledash, tan with light brown trim, and with pitched roofs, giving the impression when you drive in of entering the quaint neighborhood of a snow globe. Today, many of the buildings have been converted into boutique shops and upscale restaurants. Others, jarringly, have become fast food franchises, where, for example, you can order a Big Mac combo from a 16-year-old while listening to the player piano in the lobby.

The Biltmore Corporation is the fifth highest employer in the city. Tour guides, parking attendants, cooks, cleaners, curators, gardeners, gift shop clerks, shuttle drivers, farmers, dishwashers, event coordinators, security guards, bartenders, bakers, ticket takers. The house itself has over 250 meticulously curated rooms. It takes a small army to keep everything in order and to keep the crowds moving in and out. If you’ve lived in the city long enough, you’ll know someone who works there that can score you free passes. Otherwise, tickets are $80-$100 a pop depending on the season.