Stories of Breece D'J Pancake Read Free

Virginia. He estimated about two or three million, with about a hundred thousand people in Huntington, then the state’s largest city. It was a casual question, one with no real purpose behind it. But several days later I received in my mailbox a note from him: “Jim, I was wrong, but proportionally correct (Huntington, W. VR. has 46,000 people). To the West, Ohio has approximately 9 million. To the East, Virginia has approx. 4 million. To the South, Kentucky has approximately 3 million. To the North, Pa. has approx. 11 million. West Virginia—1,800,000—a million more than Rhode Island. P.S. See you at lunch tomorrow?” It need not be emphasized that he was very self-conscious about the poverty of his state, and about its image in certain books. He told me he did not think much of Harry Caudill’s
Night Comes to the Cumberlands.
He thought it presented an inaccurate image of his native ground, and his ambition, as a writer, was to improve on it.
    This determination to improve himself dictated that Breece should be a wanderer and an adventurer. He had attended several small colleges in West Virginia, had traveled around the country. He had lived for a while on an Indian reservation in the West. He had taught himself German. He taught for a while at a military academy in Staunton, Virginia, the same one attended by his hero, Phil Ochs. He had great admiration for this songwriter, and encouraged me to listen closely to the lyrics of what he considered Ochs’s best song, “Jim Dean of Indiana.” Breece took his own writing just as seriously, placing all his hopes on its success. He seemed to be under self-imposed pressures to “make it” as a writer. He told me once: “All I have to sell is my experience. If things get really bad, they’ll put you and me in the same ditch. They’ll pay
me
a little more, but I’ll still be in the ditch.” He liked to impress people with tall tales he had made up, and he liked to impress them in self-destructive ways. He would get into fights in lower-class bars on the outskirts of Charlottesville, then return to the city to show off his scars. “These are stories,” he would say.
    He liked people who exhibited class. He spoke contemptuously of upper-class women with whom he had slept on a first date, but was full of praise for a woman who had allowed him to kiss her on the cheek only after several dates. “She’s a lady,” he bragged to me. I think that redefining himself in terms of his
idea
of Charlottesville society was very important to Breece, even if that idea had no basis in the reality of the place. Yet there was also an antagonistic strain in him, a contempt for the conformity imposed on people there. We once attended a movie together, and during the intermission, when people crowded together in the small lobby, he felt closed in and shouted, “Move away! Make room! Let people through!” The crowd, mostly students, immediately scattered. Then Breece turned to me and laughed. “They’re clones!” he said. “They’re
clones!
”
    He loved the outdoors—hunting and fishing and hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Several times he took me hiking with him. During these outings he gave me good advice: if ever I felt closed in by the insularity of Charlottesville, I should drive up to the Blue Ridge and walk around, and that would clear my head. He viewed this communion with nature as an absolute necessity, and during those trips into the mountains he seemed to be at peace.
    He also loved to play pinball and pool and to drink beer. He was very competitive in these recreations. He almost always outdrank me, and when he was drunk he would be strangely silent. He sat stiff and erect during these times, his eyes focused on my face, his mind and imagination elsewhere. Sometimes he talked about old girlfriends in Milton who had hurt him. He related once his sorrow over the obligation imposed upon him—by a librarian in Milton—to burn and bury hundreds of old books. He