Long Time Leaving (47 page)

I thought maybe he was dumbstruck to hear anybody cast anything resembling an aspersion, even purely on visual grounds, about such a firmly established landmark in its own hometown, as if I would come to “Washington, D.C., and suggest that the Lincoln Memorial didn't work visually without some skin to spice it up. But then the other officers and the paramedic told me, “He's from California,” and took him aside and filled him in on the Haunted Pillar.

Local people tend to call it the Whipping Post. They tend to say that the reason there is a curse on it—anybody who touches it will die—is that it's what remains of the old slave market.

But that is not the official story. According to a plaque that was placed in the median strip of Broad Street at Fifth by the “Reverend Pierre Roberts Chapter of the National Colonial Dames XVIII Century” in 1996:

“On this site stood The Lower Market …a center of agricultural and livestock trade. A freakish cyclone blasted the structure in 1878 and local citizens moved the only column left standing to its present location…. According to local tradition, a wandering ‘exhorter’ predicted that anyone who pulled down the pillar would be struck dead by lightning.”

The pillar is 150-some-odd years old now, and nobody has pulled it down yet. Some people do make a point that they are not afraid of it. Allan Bates says, “Give me a high-track D9,” which I believe is a form of earth-moving heavy equipment, “and that pole is toast,” and some people may mess around with it for religious reasons. I was talking to a man who works right across the street from the Pillar, in Bill's Package Shop, which has a big mural featuring Bobby Jones and the Masters painted above it, and this man told me, “There's people out here constantly, not constantly but every day, there'll be several of 'em, climbing on it. Church groups. It's one of their requirements. I don't know what church—maybe it's not church groups, but sometimes they'll all be on bikes, and sometimes they'll all be in coats and ties.”

As he was saying this, we were standing out in front of Bill's, where we were approached by a young man who looked like he might have taken advantage of the “Suit Deal” advertised by a haberdashery a few blocks up Broad (“Starting at $119.95. Suit, Shirt, Tie Set, Shoes, Socks”). He offered to sell us a whole basket of lotions and bath oils for twelve dollars, “and this bottle here alone,” he said, “would cost you twelve dollars in the mall.” When we said we weren't interested right then, he said, “Well, to be fair, I'm going to show you this teddy bear, it plays a tune, the
battery is included, and in the mall it would cost—” We told him we weren't interested. He went on off. A man who had pulled up in a 1981 Plymouth got out and came up to us and said, “That boy trying to sell you something?” We said yes. He chuckled. “Somebody always got a deal on Broad Street,” he said. We chuckled. He said, “I've got car radios, X-ray detectors, and triple-X movies, got 'em in the trunk.”

We said we weren't interested. He got back in his car and drove off. Bill Prince, the Bill of Bill's, came outside. I asked him about the Haunted Pillar. “A man came in here and told me, ‘I'm gonna knock it down,’ and he went to a pawn shop and came back with a brand-new sledgehammer. I called the police—he went to jail and I got the sledgehammer.”

You never know what kind of transaction you might get involved in on Broad Street or what you're liable to see. Buffalo Bill Cody paraded down Broad with his four wild Indians in 1878, bearing aloft the alleged scalp of Chief Yellow Hair, which he claimed to have taken in single combat. Bill was announcing the arrival in town of his Wild West Show, which included a melodrama in which he rescued his sister from the evil clutches of the dread polygamist Brigham Young. In 1882, Oscar Wilde appeared at the Opera House, looking out into space with hand on hip and foot out-thrust and holding forth on such topics as the necessity of letting children use fine china at an early age so they would appreciate beauty. Try finding a show like that in the mall at any price.

Malls that arose in outlying areas like Martinez nearly killed the downtown back here about twenty years ago, because lots of the independent mom-and-pop stores, many of which had been Augusta fixtures for years, moved out to the new malls, then couldn't compete with the chains out there, and went under. But it's a tough old Broad, and lately it has been coming back. You walk down the street and it's not all green, no. It's like being out in the woods somewhere; you see dead things, and things that are still going strong, and new green things pushing up around them—

You might well see James Brown, resurgent. He lives in Augusta, because Augusta is where he grew up—shining shoes and dancing, clicking his brushes like castanets, on the corner of Broad and Ninth, which is now the corner of Broad and James Brown Boulevard. (Though, typically of downtown Augusta's
layeredness,
the latter street has three different names, all of which are still represented, one on top of the other, by three street signs: James Brown Boulevard, Ninth Street, and Campbell Street.) The Godfather of Soul's radio station, where one of his
daughters and one of his daughters-in-law work, is on that corner now, and the name of that station is the only name that a station owned by James Brown ought to have: WAAW.

Here's another example of Broad Street's layers: the Soul Bar, which was voted the number-one singles spot in Augusta last year by the readers of
Augusta
magazine (number two was “Church”). It's a great space for dancing and hanging out, with the original twenty-two-foot-high pressed-metal ceiling and lots of musical memorabilia on the walls and classic seventies video games. The proprietor, a Honduran-American deejay named Coco (“Cuthbert, originally,” he says, “but…”) Rubio, rented it for $250 a month from the Historic Augusta foundation a couple of years ago, and he got a “façade grant” to restore the outside, and he scraped together $10,000 and now he owns the building. From time to time James Brown stops by, and every night at midnight they play his songs. There is a Soul Bar sign out front, of course, but the façade also still says
SAFETY LOAN OFC, DISCOUNT PAWN, ZIPPERS REPAIRED,
only the
UNT OF DISCOUNT
is painted over.

Broad Street has golf stuff, too. Check out Neil Ghingold Antiques at Twelfth and Broad—but you have to knock at the door to get Neil's attention because “wholesale's always locked to the public,” he says, and the place is primarily the wholesale clothier establishment he inherited from his father: there are stacks and stacks of men's slacks for $19.98— “we're wholesale,” Neil says, “but we are flexible to the point where we don't mind accommodating you with a couple pair of pants retail, but you do have to pay the tax.” Other clothing, too—I scored a package of twelve pairs of socks, only nominally irregular, for twelve bucks. And arrayed all around the
schmattes
are collectables (“My wife says she always knows where I am,” says Neil—“out chasing junk”), from a 1917
book Diseases of the Dog and How to Feed
to dozens of 1920s hickory-shaft mashie niblicks and brassies and cleeks and pitchers and jiggers, some of them left-handed, all polished up and labeled, for $25 to $95 apiece, and several Masters caddie hats, and a 1914 Goodrich “All-One” iron whose loft you can adjust by loosening or tightening a sleeve down on the hosel. For that last item, mint, Neil is asking $2,200.

Moving along: “And did you have to break your money down into little yens and things?” I overheard a waitress asking a friend of hers who had been in Korea.

“Won.”

“One?”

“Won.”

“Oh, Marcie Lee,
honestly.
One
what?”

The ground of Augusta is bright red clay. Alongside the downtown runs the tree-lined Savannah River, itself a nice strong hazel color, on which races between everything from two hundred-mph hydroplanes to rubber ducks are staged in the spring and summer. Alongside the river is an esplanade, originally a path worn by mules towing barges, on which, by all accounts, young couples are able to stroll in perfect safety at all hours of the night. Just inland from the river is a nine-mile canal, currently under restoration, that dates back to 1845 and leads to fishing holes, wildlife, and the 176-foot chimney that is the last vestige of the Confederate Powder Works, which turned out more than two million pounds of gunpowder during the Civil “War.

But there's plenty of history just along Broad. Many of the storefronts are nineteenth-century commercial townhouses (shops with apartments upstairs) of the same style found in Philadelphia. Many of these have been restored as artists’ studios, but others are still surviving doggedly as, for instance, New York High Style Mens Wear, which offers a complete-ensemble deal twenty dollars pricier than the $119.95 one at Our Shop Mens Wear. (Across the street, just before Thanksgiving last year, you could get an entire
living-room
suite for $788, or $39 a month, with a free turkey thrown in.)

Many of these Broad Street buildings have been or are being restored by Bryan Haltermann, a student of architecture and real estate who comes from an old Augusta family and whose firm also owns the Lamar Building, a seventeen-story 1913 office building with a Doric portico and a combination of Commercial Gothic and Italianate details cast in terra-cotta, that has been through several bankruptcies and sports at its pinnacle “The Toaster.” That's what local folks call the two-story penthouse commissioned by State Senator Eugene Holley—”a two-and-a-half-million-dollar ego trip,” as Haltermann puts it—in 1973. I. M. Pei's firm designed the Toaster—all angular slabs of marble and glass. It looks like a postmodernesque party hat on the head of a late-Victorian banker. But that wasn't enough for Senator Holley. As what he called “a Christmas present to Jesus,” Holley had the Toaster topped off with a thirty-five-foot illuminated cross. But then the senator went to jail and the cross was taken down. Pei never got paid. “Here's how slick Bryan is,” says a friend of his. “He wrote his Harvard Business School thesis on why the building's [subsequent refinancing] deal wouldn't work, and then he bought it.”

Then there's the Commerce Building, which is haunted. The elevators go up and down sometimes with nobody in them. And every business
that people try to set up in it fails. Which is understandable since its address is 666 Broad, the sign of the beast.

I know that from talking with the Bateses, the tattoo folks. Allan's father, Aaron, can tell you a lot of stories. “My father was a millionaire; he didn't believe in tattooing, or anything else. But one day I saw a man coming into his bank wearing a short-sleeve shirt and sleeves tattooed on his arms—the coolest thing I ever saw. From then on, when they tried to get me to do algebra in school, I'd say, ‘Naw, I want to draw on myself.’ We were living in Japan when Allan was a seven- or eight-year-old kid, and I took him to meet one of the masters, Mr. Nakano, better known as Horioshii III. Allan was more interested at the time in parlaying my cigarettes on the black market to get American candy—”

“And I was good at it, too,” says Allan.

“—but I made notes, and years later, after his mother and I were divorced, he found those notes in the attic—

“Yeah,” says Allan. “I found a
lot
of notes you made.”

“My downfall,” says Aaron, “has been writing things down.”

Have father and son ever done any skin art on each other? “Yeah,” says Aaron, “once. Both of us looked at the other and said, ‘You're too heavy-handed. You can't do me anymore.’ ”

Another thing I learned from the Bateses is that one of the new wrinkles in body modification is horns. At first, people were implanting stainless steel, nylon, Teflon nubs, and gradually replacing them with larger ones as the skin grew around them, “but the way it's leaning now,” says Allan, “is to take a piece of bone material, or horn material from an animal, which will adhere to the skull and become a legitimate horn. Anybody who's serious about implants now is going toward organic materials.”

Has anyone ever asked for a tattoo of the Masters logo? No. It probably wouldn't be legal anyway—the Augusta National people are very protective of their copyright. But the Treybon! restaurant, located in a former heavy-equipment warehouse on Reynolds Street, between Broad and the river, sells a T-shirt with a logo that includes the outline of the United States (“which is pretty hard to copyright,” observes Steve Mitchell, the proprietor of Treybon!), a star where the Masters logo has a golf ball, and a chili pepper instead of a flagstick.

Treybon's décor features a
NO CHIPPING PLEASE
sign from Augusta National and a flag from the eighteenth green. Also, an old beaver skin and “just mostly things people's wives wouldn't let them hang up at home,” says Steve.

The most famous barbecue place in town is owned by the mayor, Larry
Sconyers, but I didn't care for the sauce—its dominant ingredient seemed to be burnt cookie crumbs or something. Treybon! is the place to go for gumbo, Brunswick stew, red beans and rice, chili, and, especially, barbecue ribs and sandwiches. Steve gathered his recipes and techniques during years of research around the South back when he was a traveling medical-equipment salesman. Once near Tunica, Mississippi, on his way from Memphis to New Orleans, he saw a sign on the side of the road, painted on a piece of board,
BBQ
and an arrow. He was running late, but he couldn't resist. He drove off up a side road a couple of miles until he came to an old church “with six or seven cars parked outside, and nine or ten guys, all black—there was smoke coming up from the pit and they were chopping meat on big plywood tables. I had a case of beer—I traveled with beer all the time—and we started talking. It was a Thursday. They said they were going to serve the barbecue on Saturday.

“I said, ‘You're going to wait two days?’ Man looked at me and said, ‘That's just like white folks—always want to serve green meat.’ ”

See, they were chopping the meat while it was still hot, and working in a mixture of spices while they chopped it, so the flavors would set in while the meat cooled. And then, when they heated it up again on Saturday:
seasoned
meat. Meat with overtones and undertones.