Will Jones
Staff Writer
The Blistered Chicken was closed. The man behind the bar said so, without intonation or apology, when he saw four skinny college boys stroll laughing in through the steel door: “Tomorrow there’ll be a live band. Dancing and crazy hats and two-dollar drafts. But tonight we’re closed. Early.”
“I guess when you own a place called The Blistered Chicken Saloon you can shut your doors whenever you damn please,” one of my friends said philosophically from the back seat. I looked at the cinderblocks and said nothing. The building was wrapped round with an acrylic mural of leathery bikers and their leathery women riding wrathfully through what was otherwise a flannelgraph board landscape of puffy clouds and puffy trees and little puffy bushes. It was like something a deranged second grader would have painted, if deranged second graders knew how to paint cleavage.
We were 30 minutes north of Dayton on a rutted logging road, and it was far too early this Friday night to quit. Besides, I had promised these boys that I would show them someplace fresh, someplace forbidden, someplace with billiard tables and a beer tap and the potential for bodily harm. There was only one road to take now, and Mama’s was at the end of it.
Summer City Road begins right across from the turnoff to Oren Wooden’s Apple Orchard and winds for about nine miles past tomato fields and homesteads till it reaches Luminary Crossroads.
Luminary is one of the remotest communities in East Tennessee — and one of the poorest. The chief landowner in these parts, Hasty-Greene Investments, runs ads in Miami and Chicago papers advertising a mountain paradise at only $3,400 an acre. On the surface it’s a peach of deal, and people who need a place to hide out from the law or the tax collector, or who just want to get away from the big city, take it, without research.
And the land is beautiful, cragged and steep, shaded by spruce and tall elms, and its beauty makes the land hard — hard to build on, hard to farm. There are no jobs besides tomato picking within 30-minutes drive, and the roads freeze in the winter and flood in the summer. People arrive from out of town, live out of their cars or tents for a few months until they realize they don’t know how to plant a farm or dig a well or build a house, and leave after the first winter. Hasty-Greene collects these people’s down payments, writes new advertisements, and puts the abandoned lots back on the market. For sale. Rolling alpine forests and meadows. Cheap.
The first house we see is a shack made from particleboard, tarp and aluminum sheeting — the yard is studded with stumps and boulders and what’s left of the trees are stacked in neat piles in front around an old boiler stove. There’s a gaslight in the window that flickers on when we pass. The next house is not much different, or the next. And then we find Mama’s.
The sign for Mama’s is written in red paint on a sheet of plywood and nailed to a tree. I can’t tell if it looks more like an advertisement or a warning. Except for a neon Miller Lite sign, Mama’s could easily be mistaken for an abandoned tool shed. Or a slaughterhouse.
I parked outside and we sat in silence in the idling car for a solid minute. Someone asks, “We going to do this?” It’s an honest question, one that takes hard thought and faith in an afterlife to answer: “Yeah. Yeah we are.”
There is only one customer at the bar, swigging on a quarter-liter plastic flask of Canadian Club Classic and talking to no one in particular. He is toasted and incredulous at our presence, and old, very old. He looks at me with his mouth agape, and when I give him a “howdy, sir,” he lopes off to the bathroom muttering, “I ain’t a damned colonel.”
Then there’s the bar’s owners: a grizzled man in flannel named Pete and a pale woman with straight, jet-black hair falling to her waist who introduces herself as “Mama.” Pete greets us with friendliness and more than a little amusement while Mama takes our orders. The old man tries to order a Corona, and when Mama says it’ll be $4, he grunts almost reflexively: “whores don’t charge that.” Maybe out here they don’t.
But overall the space is very comfortable and boasts two pristine coin-operated pool tables, along with posters advertising weekly tournaments, $10 buy-ins. A stout wood stove heats the entire room comfortably. The walls are hung with thousands of 4×6 Polaroid photographs of the bar’s various events and clientele.
It is the variety and liveliness of these photographs that interest me the most. There are boys in Carhartt and Hollister giggling and flipping off the camera as if they just learned how. There are surly hunters in ghillie suits sucking down Yuenglings and looking generally lost and annoyed. There are hundreds of migrant workers in button-downs and cowboy hats waltzing with Mama at a Halloween party. There is a surprising number of pretty girls, or at least girls who used to be pretty, doing turns with the boys in the haze. A girl in a cat-suit hangs off her man, her mascara smeared around her closed eyes, and you can hear George Strait crackle, “You’ll always be a fire I can’t put out.”
“I have lived up here since 1970 and had this place for a little over 10 years,” Pete tells me seriously. “We used to be full most nights of the week, especially in the summers when the Guatemalans would come by and dance and drink and shoot pool till two in the morning. Then they’d get up the next day at five and work twelve hours. They don’t get paid enough or stay long enough to come now. It’s only $140 a week for most of them, and they leave as soon as they can. I don’t blame ‘em — it’s blood money is what it is. Most of the white people that stay around live on checks, so they don’t have enough to get out much.”
Pete tells me that business has been poor for several years now, that most of the long-term residents are either too poor or too sanctimonious to give Mama’s much business.
“I’m going to guess there’s not a whole lot going on in Dayton tonight,” he asks with a smirk, “seeing as this place isn’t exactly full of college kids each Friday night.”
I smile and say, “no sir,” and finish cursing my last pool shot. We pay and wave goodnight but not before Mama tells us that tomorrow night’s karaoke: “That always brings in a crowd.”
It’s almost 1 a.m., and the air outside smells like wood smoke. It’s not sympathy for these people that I feel: they choose to keep this place open each night, and apparently enough people stumble in on the weekends to keep the lights on. I admire that kind of stubbornness and hope that I have some of it.
But mostly, I just hope I have enough gas to make it home without stalling. The sky is silver with stars but the woods glow with deep and distant fires, and I wonder what combination of desperation and amphetamines it would take to live in a shack on a dirt road through a winter like the one we’d just had, and stay, hunkered down in the husks of old school buses and big-rig trailers, gathering firewood, hauling in buckets of potable water, and waiting — or more likely, hiding — from help. It takes 20 minutes on a mountain road to get back to Highway 30, and the air no longer smells like smoke when we stop to look in silence at the stars.
