This is the latest addition to my memoir-in-progress. If you haven’t read it from the beginning, here’s a little backstory:
I moved from New York with my dog, Wogart, to the small mountain town of Nevada City, California when I was twenty-three. I lived there for a few years and they were pretty fun, at least until the meth heads started moving up from the city and my neighbor got out of prison and came back to live in his house across the street. But before that it was good. I fell in love with a skater and we started a folk punk band. We made money busking and spent it on records and beer. Summers were spent floating in the river, winters making soup on a wood stove. We had lots of friends and free time. We had jobs—shit jobs, mostly—but other than that we kept a flexible schedule and were closer to childhood than adulthood in that we didn’t worry about what time it was or what needed to be done. We didn’t worry about the future.
Here are the most recent chapters:
And the beginning: The Trick is to Drink it Quickly
Next chapter: The Shepherd
Cheers
Nevada City was pretty idyllic, and my life there was pretty idyllic too, at first, but before long I began to feel the strain of being a non-redneck living in redneck country. There are a lot of rednecks in the woods of California and back then there were a lot of pot operations out there and they were guarded with guns and threats of violence and sometimes actual violence. But deep in the backwoods there was something more, something worse, something I learned about when we went driving around in the mountains hoping to find some cheap land for sale, where we might turn onto a dirt road and after a few miles of nothing but trees we would start to see cabins, shacks really, and people—sometimes just bodies lying on the ground—alive, we hoped, or maybe they’d be standing and they’d turn to look at us as we drove by but it was like they turned their heads in slow motion, just gone, and I couldn’t even imagine what drug could make them like that. But that was way way deep in the backwoods and out in the regular world there were mostly just regular rednecks or good ol’ boys or whatever you want to call them, but I learned pretty quick that if you weren’t careful, if you didn’t stick to your place and leave them to theirs, they might chase you with guns.
Jesse—whose own family combined a taste for hunting with a love of Jesus and a distaste for homos and blacks and jews and vegetarians, while also being kind-hearted intelligent people who owned a lot of shot guns (a contradiction I’ll never be able to wrap my head around, prefering to keep my own satisfyingly clear-cut prejudices intact) had more experience with that kind of thing, but to me, coming from Santa Barbara—a town so posh they named a soap opera after it—with all my cultured bohemian upbringing it was like something out of a book or a documentary about very closely related banjo players. One time we went up to the mountains and said something like let’s go drive around and see what’s down this dirt road. We went driving for a mile or so and rounded a corner and saw a sheet of plywood nailed to a huge pine tree with words painted on it that looked like they’d been painted on by a 5-year-old if a 5-year-old was a gnarly hillbilly who hadn’t graduated kindergarten that read “Trespassers shot. Survivers shot again.” At first we were like, look at that, ha ha ha, that’s funny, and kept driving. And then it kind of sunk in that this was actually not a joke and maybe we should turn around. Jesse wanted to take some photos of the sign first though and he got out of the car with his camera and I was like no come on read the words dude let’s go already and finally we started driving back but after a little while we saw a cloud of dust behind us and a pick up truck driving fast straight at us, straight up to the back of our car. There were some rough looking young guys in it and they had their windows down and were yelling at us and Jesse sped up all the way until we got to the main road where there was a stop sign at the highway. When we stopped, they jumped out of their truck and started running up to the car and Jesse was like oh I’ll just talk to them and everything will be fine, but then I saw their guns and I said get the fuck out of here, now! and Jesse stepped on it and they ran after us and it was pretty intense but we got onto the highway and after that they didn’t chase us any more.
There were a lot of rednecks in Nevada City, as it turned out. Even the cops were rednecks, or something close to it—they were bored and sleazy and corrupt and we knew them by name and vice versa. They left us alone unless they needed something to do, but they needed something to do more often than not and then they made themselves unpleasant, and so did we if we possibly could. They sneered and swaggered and offered to write tickets or arrest us for loitering if we were standing for more than 5 minutes anywhere and if you were female they leered and made insinuating comments about your body or your clothes and they were always fingering their holsters like they were about to pull out their guns.
One time Officer Sandy pulled out his gun and pointed it at Wogart. To be fair, Jesse and I were drinking at the end of a dark alley late at night and Wogart barked as Sandy approached us, but there was no need for him to yell “I’m going to shoot your dog,” over and over, as I had already called Wogart back and put him on leash, besides which it was complete bullshit because Sandy already knew Wogart perfectly well but he just pretended not to know him right then because he wanted to threaten us with the gun. You know Wogart, Sandy, I said, quickly putting my beer back in its brown paper bag. Sandy knew Wogart and knew that Wogart was well-liked around town. Wogart was dignified and friendly and unlike Sandy he didn’t need a badge or a gun to gain people’s respect. Wogart was sitting quietly now but Sandy was still pointing the gun at us and Jesse said you should put away that gun before something bad happens. We were afraid but were pretending to be calm because he wasn’t. Finally he put the gun away. “I’m giving you a warning!” he said as he started to turn back down the alley and we nodded in silence, because the guy with the gun gets the last word.
He reached the end of the alley and we watched as he rounded the corner and disappeared. When he was out of sight, Jesse got his beer back out of the bag. He looked at me and lifted the bottle. Cheers, he said, and took a drink.
When I first bought my house I’d noticed the little cabin across the street, sitting empty. I asked a neighbor about it. That's Charlie's house, she said. Shot a man right there on the porch, a number of years ago. Argument about a woman. He's in prison now.
That’s good, I said.
I wasn't too worried that Charlie would ever come back, but about six months after I moved in, he did. He was a tiny guy with wild, darting eyes. Not wanting to be on the wrong side of a murderer, I made a point of saying hello whenever I saw him. After a while some younger guys moved in there with him. They were rednecks, with big trucks and shotguns, and seemed to be high on crack or meth or something. Our house was full of punks and hippies with dreads and crystals around their necks. The redneck guys made it clear that they didn’t like us. A month or so after they moved in I started finding my trash cans, all six of them, knocked over where they sat at the top of my driveway. It happened every morning, and every morning I would pick them up and right them, but the next morning they’d be lying on their sides again. It turned out that the redneck guys were deliberately backing into them with their trucks. I couldn’t understand why they would do this, and sure as hell didn’t know what to do about it, so did nothing. But then one morning I woke up and looked out the window and saw that my front hedge—a bay laurel that ran parallel between my house and the road for the entire length of the house—was gone. The rednecks had come in the night and cut it down. There was nothing left of it, just stumps and a few jagged branches sticking out here and there. At this point I felt like, as the homeowner, I had to do something. But what? I was too afraid to try and talk to them, what would I even say? “Sorry but could you please stop terrorizing me and vandalizing my property?” I thought I might have better luck with Charlie, so I went over to his cabin one morning after the scary guys had driven off. He opened the door but didn’t say anything, just stood there, glaring at me suspiciously.
Hi! I’m Anna, I said.
He didn’t say anything.
I moved in across the street a while back, I said. I like your cabin, it’s really cool. This whole neighborhood is amazing!
He shut the door.
I figured that was the end of it but later that night Charlie showed up at my house and started banging at the door with a two-by-four full of nails. Wogart ran over and stuck his head out the door, hackles raised. I’ll kill you and your damn dog! said Charlie, so I shut the door and bolted it. Wogart stood listening, hackles still up, until he left, then came over and leaned his head against my leg.
I called the cops the next day. Charlie is crazy, I said, when they—Sandy and another guy—showed up. He’s violent, he murdered someone right there on that porch and his friends are aggressive and predatory and they cut down my hedge and they look in the windows and make sexual comments about me whenever I go out the door.
Sandy listened to me, nodding his head. Well, he said, when I’d finished. He had a funny look on his face. Look at you, he said. I've got to say you look damn sexy in that sweater, can't blame them for noticing. I'm noticing right now. You probably like it or you wouldn't be dressed like that.
His companion snickered. I felt my face grow hot with rage, but didn’t say anything. I couldn’t decide which was worse: the fact of the murderer neighbor and the meth heads or this new realization that the cops were complete scum and even the law wouldn’t help me. Plus there was the feeling of wanting to murder them myself which was clearly palpable because even though I was frozen in shock and hadn’t said a word, Wogart suddenly began to growl. I’d call off your damn dog if I were you, said Sandy, hand on his holster. Go sit down, Wogart, I said. He looked up at me, quizzically, but went and sat on the couch. He stayed there, calm but ready, until they left.
I called Jesse and told him what had happened and he came right over. Wogart greeted him at the door with a hug and so did I. Thanks for trying to protect our girl from the bad guys, he said to Wogart. I don’t know about you, he said to me, but all this has made me pretty thirsty ...what do you say we blow this shithole and go get a drink?
We went to the pub and had a pint and before we drank we lifted our glasses. Prost said Jesse who had lived in Bavaria, Na zdraví I said because I had lived in Prague, and banged my glass on the table, remember the dead, before taking a sip. I liked doing that because it acknowledged death, but then you got to drink.
jesus that town sounds warped and ive lived in plenty of redneck towns...Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and 20 years in Florida Panhandle (Lower Alabama). I worked with plenty of em and for most part get along and easily enough with but these creeps evoke Straw Dogs meets Twin Peaks and thats a bad mix. Here in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan you'll never see that kind of paranoid unpleasant signage unlike in Panhandle those dusty roads i drove looking for some customer to work on their house or a pond to fish in where just 2 of the clever signs at head of scrub pine drives read "Theres Nothing on This Property Worth Dying For" and another "Any Further and You are in Range". Work was slow there during the census of 2020 so i got a job doin that and loved meeting all these people i never would have and exploring but one place i pulled into had a chain fence and sign spouting some anti-government hysteria and i could hear the automatic weapons popping up above in a field. Sauntered over to fence double checking my map and they must have had a camera and suddenly down the hill speeds a jeep with four young bucks waving assault weapons and screeching like Apache. I lit a cigarette and showed them my credentials but they ran me off anyways obviously hoping i'd say something incendiary. I was gonna ask them where i could get a bumper sticker with stick figures "meet the family" but on rusted-out trucks read "Meet My Very Loud Family" and the silhouettes are not the kids but all various guns lined up. Makes me laugh to think how the NRA has been humbled lately, you never hear SHIT from them anymore and this crap will end eventually with people like that living in their own areas of incompetence and ignorance. Fuck em.
I don’t have a fiery temper but if someone threatens my animals… I get pretty damn ugly fast! I’ve never had to stand up to crazy rednecks with an arsenal of guns though!
This line… so true - love it!
“Wogart was dignified and friendly and unlike Sandy he didn’t need a badge or a gun to gain people’s respect.”
Fantastic writing Anna, I do hope Sandy and that crazy Charlie guy meet their match some day - perhaps each other!