About twenty
years ago (I think it was spring of '85), a friend of mine accompanied his
brother and a small band of mischievous honor students to the Rossville High
School Sports Annex. There, under cover of—well I don’t suppose there was much
cover really—they proceeded to paint the small, concrete block guard shack that
sat next to the main gate.
Now, I'm not sure
why there was a guard shack. There was never even a guard in there. The gates
were always open. I'm still not sure why
they even bothered with the fence in the first place, much less a guard shack.
Maybe it was used for the parking lot attendants at basketball games but, if
that was the case, I have no recollection of it.
One night very
near the end of their senior year, these honor students (observed by but not
assisted by my friend, a freshman) painted that extraneous structure using
alternating horizontal bands of purple and pink. Of course, being honor
students and future leaders of the free world, they did a damn fine job. There
was no coloring outside the lines or sloppy brushwork. It looked really good
and would have looked even better had the redecoration not been interrupted by
the local police department. Apparently,
someone who lived near the school (and it’d been a long, long time since that
was a good neighborhood) called to report the vandalism. I picture it thusly:
A pair of
beady, gray eyes beneath cheap mascara and thick blue eye shadow, peer out from
behind faded floral print drapes. A mouth drops open, exposing yellowed, uneven
teeth and a mossy tongue. A phone is grabbed and a call is frantically placed.
911, of course. There is no time for looking up the regular number. This is an
emergency! Screw the people whose houses are burning or who are being beaten to
hamburger by their drunk husbands! This is a real crisis! The guard shack is
being painted by hooligans with absolutely no regard for the school's
well-established blue and white color scheme! Something has to be done—and quickly!
So the cops
arrived and all but one of the hooligans were rounded up and carted off to
jail. Parents were called. School administrators were notified. And the first
pungent whiffs of the inevitable shitstorm wafted into town on an otherwise
pleasant spring breeze.
You must
remember that this happened in the mid 1980s. It was a simpler time. A more
backward, head-up-the-ass kind of time. A time when shit like this was still
sort of a big deal—particularly when honor students were involved.
And these were
real honor students. In an era when
Rossville was graduating salutatorians who had never even read a full novel,
these young men were actual geniuses. In a community overflowing with Pinkies,
they were a band of Brains.
The hooligans'
level of intellect made their crime all the worse. How could good students do a
thing like that?! And using those colors! It was openly speculated that they were
the first wave of a Gay Communist plot to destroy Middle America (which, thanks
to the televised Oliver North trials, Rossvillians now knew was somehow
different from Central America). If these thinkers could be corrupted by the
Godless Left, how could the slow-witted football players resist the
ever-growing anti-American temptation of freewill?
So they were
punished. There was talk that they would not be allowed to graduate. This would
have meant the first four or five seats at graduation would be empty and, aside
from the guest speaker, not much would be said.
Eventually, however, it was all resolved. The hooligans gave their
speeches, graduated with the honors they so deserved and went off to fine
colleges and fine careers and, in at least one case, a fine wife.
The student
most punished was the one who was least involved. My friend, being a freshman
at the time had a suspension that carried over into the next school year. He
ended up in a great private college and eventually went on to a great career
and a great wife, but this hurt his quest for the perfect GPA and is probably
what kept him from being Valedictorian three years later.
The important
thing is that these students, in spite of their “station in life”, were
punished for desecrating school property. The community property had to be
defended and preserved! For two or three
more years anyway.
In 1989,
Rossville Comprehensive High School saw its last 12th grade graduation.
Beginning the following year, high school students in that part of Walker
County attended the brand new Ridgeland High School, a few miles away. The old
high school building became the new Rossville Middle School since the old
Junior High had burned a few years earlier.
Although I
continued to live in Rossville for several more years, I slowly lost touch with
it. It became background scenery on the way to work and, eventually, that place
across the ridge with the good burger joint (that would be the Dream Cream). I
lived not more than five or ten miles away, but I completely lost touch with
the city that had once been my home. I
went to college, found a career, got stuck in a boring loop of that career,
broke out of the dead end cycle, met Christie, got married and moved to
Rossville.
I loved (and
still love) Christie, but I hated moving back to Rossville. I resisted it with
great surliness and much whining. Christie had a very nice home but, for the
first several months, I was just not happy there. We live in what is, far and
away, the best neighborhood in Rossville, but that didn’t matter. I lived among
a type of people I can’t stand and, to top it all off, I was back in Rossville.
I was nearly 35 and, in my mind, I should have been living in Atlanta, New
York, Amsterdam, or a place with padded walls. I should have been anywhere but
Rossville.
Eventually, being
an at least marginally reasonable person, I came to love the home almost as
much as I love Christie. It’s really a nice little neighborhood, it’s a pretty
good location and, apart from some stupid taxation policies and a dangerously
right-wing governor, Georgia is a fairly decent place to live.
The actual
city of Rossville, however... Not so great.
When my
parents were kids and teenagers, Rossville was really hoppin’. There were
theatres and shops and restaurants and lots of things to bring people over the
state line from Chattanooga. By the time I was in junior high, though, it was
all going away. There were still some decent little mom and pop restaurants,
some high-dollar dress shops, and a few other nice little stores. But it was
fading fast.
I think it was
around that time (this would have been the early ‘80s) that the Rossville
Development Corporation (or R.D.C.) was formed. It was led by a group of
Rossville bigwigs (mostly members of families who owned or had owned the many
textile mills in town) and its mission was to restore Rossville to its former
glory.
For a while,
there were R.D.C. signs all over the place. Old, faded walls were painted
bright white and emblazoned with the bright blue and red R.D.C. logo. It seemed
to me to be sort of a promise of things to come. Either the factories would
re-open or there would be urban renewal and we’d get snazzy new shops and
restaurants and condos and artists and all the things that make for great
little towns.
Of course,
none of this ever happened. The reasons are many and complex so I won’t go into
that now. While I was a few miles away, living my life, hope slowly evaporated
and the town died. Shops closed, minds closed even tighter, and the town became
a rotting shell of what it had once been. The lottery, which could have helped
tremendously, only served to further eat away at the body and soul of the
little city. By the time I moved back, the town was so far gone that I doubt it
will ever recover.
But, as they
say, hope springs eternal.
So, one day a
few weekends ago, I went out wandering Rossville with my trusty Canon Rebel and
a few rolls of black and white film. (Remember film? It’s cool stuff.) Anyone who’s ever seen my photography knows
that I absolutely love decay and chaos. Entropy is my muse. I figured that
Rossville would be a great place to indulge my thirst for old buildings,
cobwebs and moss. It was. But it was more than that.
That day
depressed the shit out of me.
I had noticed,
of course, that the old R.D.C. stuff was fading but I’d never really realized just
how far gone the city is. It was a water
tower that—to use a bad pun—brought it all home for me. It stands next to one of the abandoned factories.
For a long time, it was bright white and R.D.C. logo painted on it was vibrant
and bold. Now the tower is rusted and scarred and the R.D.C. is barely
readable. No new company has plastered promises on that tower or anywhere else
in town. No one has graffitied hope. Rossville is that patient that’s been
shoved to the side to die while the doctors operate on the ones that have a
chance. And, two blocks over from the
water tower that marks the site of Rossville’s demise, there’s the old
Rossville High Annex. And its guard shack.
The little,
gray building looks like it’s been hit by two tornadoes and a heavy truck. The
concrete blocks are askew, the paint is long gone and it looks like a bug
landing on it would knock it right over. This little building whose honor had
been so vehemently defended during my high school days was now a mostly forgotten
wreck.
I took a
picture of it and, later, sent it to my friend who had been along for the ride
but hadn’t actually participated in the “redecorating”. He didn’t even
recognize it at first. He told me that, although they had to repaint the sides,
no one ever bothered to look on the roof and, unless the years had weathered it
away, there would still be the names of the guys who had desecrated the
building so many years before.
These four
future leaders, in a moment of tame rebellion, had put their mark on a part of their
hometown, and it was covered up posthaste. But their signatures remain (I
didn’t actually check to see if they’re still there. I just like to think that
they are), out of sight and, very nearly, out of mind.
It made me
wonder where my signature was on the town, on lives, on anything. Where have I
secretly written my name? And who will ever know it was there?
Depressed
beyond all reason, I put my camera away, went home and kissed my wife. That night, I decided to start this blog.
