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Test the TV in case the area is as bare of incident as it seems from the Interstate. Cable. Saved.
Grab a salad at the Western Steer. Frosted-haired women bellowed at toddlers. Stubble-faced fathers cut meat, lectured, snapped at fussy toddlers. Married couples gazed past each other out the sunset-stricken windows. The Western Steer that evening was a bad place for a single man, weighed down as it was by the heft of gobbling families.
Who is THAT? they will think. No one will know. If they would just look away and go on chowing down, that would be all right, but my portable insecurities make me think they will keep on looking until they make some guesses, and whether I fear right guesses or wrong ones more is difficult to tell.
The check-out woman looks as though she were sent from Central Casting, her ash-blond bee-hive mounting over a pink uniform, name tag-- Phyllis--secured by a pink plastic corsage, lipstick-darkened cigarette balanced on the top of the cash register with the burning end pointing, considerately, away from the feeding families. The effect, however, is not droll, but rather sibylline. There is something mysterious, something knowing about her. I ask where "downtown" is, and she points, blowing air between her layers of lipstick, as though she were exhaling a drag of her Camel. She says "You won't find what you're looking for there." I smile and shrug, pretending I don't know what she means.
Phyllis short changes me. I'm too embarrassed to say anything. . . it's only a buck or so, and maybe this is a test the locals put strangers to. . . But before I reach the door, Phyllis is upon me, whopping her apologies, waving the dollar in the air, so our exchange becomes a public event.
I drive on past the restaurant to the Princeton "downtown," a real if tiny urban area rising in contrast to the straggle of abandoned motels and bare fields around it. I park on the street and walk. I wish I had dressed more like a Sunday night. Likely I had forgotten it was a Sunday night.
The streets of Princeton, West Virginia, are alive, teeming, an uncommon thing in the era of malls. Like other last-quarter-of-the-twentieth-century downtowns, it's scruffy and gap-toothed: half-way houses and evangelical churches stand where theaters once disgorged their happy crowds. Dusty windows open on sealed, vacant rooms. Airborne trash tangles in the unpruned shrubbery. But what happens on the streets has nothing to do with their state of repair, There is vibrancy and expectation. The citizens of Princeton at their evening constitutionals are like a festal procession passing through a ruined cathedral.
Two basic sorts of people were at large--first, Christians going to Sunday evening service in the variety of storefront evangelical hot spots. Several conventional church buildings studded the downtown area, but these seemed to be closed or to be operating at a level of intensity completely obscured by the gospel storefronts.
The meeting-goers paused in their conversations on the sidewalk when I appeared. They greeted me from behind starched pastel dresses and hot black suits. I hoped someone would invite me in. I would have gone. But maybe my fatigues, black T-shirt and mirror sunglasses made them think I had come looking for other things. I listened as I passed them, gathered in the lingering Sunday afternoon twilight before services began. They talked of family and money. People repeated what had just been said, to show how intensely that had been listening. They amened and yeslorded. When it was time for the service to start, they put their hands on the centers of their friends' backs, to guide each other in.
The second type of people on the street were teenagers prowling in a hundred different kinds of vehicles--"cruising" as one sees mostly in nostalgic movies now, shouting to one another and to the occasional passer on the sidewalk, or to stationary teenagers gathered in vacant lots like celebrities in a parade viewing stand. A boy in a truck equipped with a loudspeaker called me "dude" three times before I looked at him. I thought he was going to mock me for some trespass only an outsider would commit, but when I finally acknowledged him he smiled and asked for the time. He didn't want the time. He wanted contact, for himself and for me. He wanted to welcome me to the sweet dishevelment.
There were girls with blond hair tousled as though all had shampooed at once and hit the street still wet. Boys with caps pulled low and sleeves rolled high, tanned from whatever it was they did all day. They longed for each other, but understood that something had to precede the simple attainment, some ceremony, some delicious and flashy postponement. I longed for them too in a sort of abstract way--longed for the time they inhabit, for the innocence with which they were able to let their desires be known. The very abstraction of my own desire was a disappointment to me.
I wanted to watch. This time merely to watch. To be invisible and unmarked.
The lower end of the Princeton main street, where it dead-ends into the railroad tracks, is a ghost town of derelict buildings, of roofless factories and ruined warehouses, of people leaning from the windows of the apartments still habitable, talking in soft voices while their printed curtains flutter in the wind.
I enter a shotgun grocery run by, plainly, two gay men. They stand when they see me, as though expecting trouble. I have, after all, dressed like a hoodlum. They're talking about a memorable night spent in Roanoke. Dishing people unknown to me. I stalk past them to the cooler, select the one thing they seem to have in abundance: chocolate milk. The expiration date is today; I decide to take my chances.
"Will that be cash?" one says.
I chuckle. "Do people around here often use credit cards to pay for a chocolate milk?"
"Food stamps," he answers. I suddenly feel crude and luxurious. I stand on the street swilling my milk, afraid I'll look ridiculous if I drink and walk at the same time, a waif chugging chocolate amid the ruins.
Across from a derelict factory stood yet another storefront church, more exposed to the street than those uptown. Inside, people wailed and swayed on the balls of their feet, one exceptionally beautiful and well dressed young woman having hands laid on her forehead by a sweating elder. I crossed the street to pass as close as possible. I wondered if I dared to go in, finally deciding that curiosity was an inappropriate motive for the entering of a holy place.
On the sidewalk before the church were a boy of twelve or thirteen, and a girl a few years younger. The girl was skinny, energetic, straightforward. The boy was bespectacled, overweight, trapped in a fancy suit a size too small for him. Sometimes he stood in the doorway looking in. Sometimes he hid just past the outside door frame, as though theatrically avoiding the glance of somebody within. He was plainly in a paroxysm of uncertainty. Perhaps he was deciding whether he belonged to the ceremony or not. He looked intelligent, out of place, mortified. He looked, in fact, like me at that age. I felt a tenderness toward him that must be like the tenderness of fathers, who see what lies ahead for their sons and can do nothing. He paced the hot street.
As I strolled by, oozing secularity, his allegiance firmed for a moment, and he began to sing a gospel hymn, in a voice strong, deep for a child, and very beautiful. I smiled. I wanted to speak, but it would have interrupted his song. We watched each other until the street bent. I wanted to know whether he sang for me or against me, or without any thought of me at all. I have a feeling it was defense against my approach, but perhaps it was an invitation, an open door.
I wish I'd pause to see whether he had entered the storefront or gone home at last. I voted for home.
Yellow evening light had shaded into purple when I came up again to the main drag. I was the only walker left on the sidewalks. The cars kept on, though. I watched the cruisers until it was long past dark, when only their headlights revealed their passage, and one must select, if one wished to select at all, by faith.
I mention sometimes that I spent a night in Princeton, West Virginia. On purpose. I expect people to take it the same way as if I had said, "I have just returned from an expedition to Belize" but they don't. They say, "Oh, do you know someone there?" and I've almost answered "yes" before I remember coming as a stranger, leaving as a stranger, my mind filled with faces and voices never to be known again, who might remember me--if at all-- as background in a dream, an attendant desperado fit to swell the progress of the night street.
But the answer is, after all, yes: the redneck yelling from his truck, wanting something, thinking that somebody who hears might tell him what; the kid outside the storefront church, the uncertain boy on the brink of adolescence, not knowing whether to stay out or go in. Part or apart. I knew him because he was me. A kid who took his confusion inside himself and spat it out as song.
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