Escaping Gortnerville

This story contains a description of racist actions.

This was the big day. I had showered, put on the only suit I owned, the only white dress shirt that I owned, my best tie, and my black dress shoes. The job interview was at 1:00 and I was in my Ford Focus at 10:30. I had given myself two and a half hours for the trip from Gortnerville to Easter. It was an hour long trip tops from what I remembered. I hadn’t been there since my college days and that was ten years ago. I wasn’t taking any chances. I set my GPS for 210 Chancellor’s Lane, Easter, Kentucky, and I started on my way!

“Take Gortnerville Lane for 0.6 miles.”

This was my chance to get out of Gortnerville and I planned on making the most of it! I had gone to college at Easter State College over there in Easter and I remembered it as a nice little town with nice people. Gortnerville, on the other hand, was a little town, population 999, but it was anything but nice.

I lost my last job six months back. I reached the point where I had two choices-move in with my folks in Gortnerville or move into a homeless shelter. I chose Gortnerville and I can’t help but think that I chose wrongly.

I never liked it here. My parents and I moved here from Ohio when I was in fifth grade. If I mentioned the name of the town we lived in up there, nobody would recognize it. I’ll just say it was south of Cleveland and north of Columbus. And I never did fit in up there either. My family comes from Eastern Kentucky and I sound like Loretta Lynn’s husband did in Coal Miner’s Daughter. The kids I was in school with nicknamed me “Hillbilly” and they didn’t mean it as a term of endearment.

When we moved to Gortnerville, I was determined that I was going to fit in and have lots of friends.

Then came my first day at Gortnerville Elementary.

I was walking to the principal’s office to get some papers for my parents to fill out. A kid named Kenny Wallers was walking in the opposite direction. I smiled and waved, trying to be friendly. Kenny glared and held up both middle fingers.

“Is something wrong?” I asked, not understanding.

“Yeah, your face!” he spat the words more than saying them. ”You look like what I step in every time I walk into my Papaw’s barn!”

Kenny was one of the nicer kids that I met that day.

In Gortnerville, the greatest crime a person could commit was being different. If you looked, dressed, spoke, thought, or believed any differently than everybody else, you were despised.

Oh, it gets worse.

“Turn right onto Highway 6 for 11 miles.”

I turned onto the highway.

And here’s how it gets worse...

Gortnerville Elementary really didn’t have enough students to field a football team, but the parents insisted. Thirty five years ago, a Gortnerville kid named Mike Turkin had got an athletic scholarship at Tennessee and everybody in town thought their boy would be the next big star to come out of the area. Truth is, Turkin had been at UK for two years before getting kicked off the team and transferring to a community college. Turkin had played a grand total of 12 minutes of college football. He somehow got a teaching degree and, by the time that I arrived in town, this bald headed bowling ball of a man was the head coach of the Gortnerville Greyhounds.

People around here acted like Coach was a folk hero. Fact was, he was a loud mouthed jerk who smelled of Pabst Blue Ribbon and Copenhagen snuff.

At the start of my sixth grade year, they had a contest to decide on a school fight song. “Eye of The Tiger” finished second. Coach Turkin’s choice won the contest. Anybody who grew up in the south or midwest when I did has head this song. It was the same tune as the theme song from the old Daniel Boone TV series, only the words were changed to make it something out of a Ku Klux Klan songbook. Our principal, Mr. Stapleton, a really decent man, had overruled the outcome and ruled that “Eye of the Tiger” would be our fight song. That didn’t discourage Coach Turkin. Every time, the Greyhounds played a school with black players or cheerleaders, Coach would signal some of the kids in the stands and they would launch into what I called the “Klaniel Boone song”. The Greyhounds were a miserable excuse for a football team and lost nearly games by five or six touchdowns, but if a black player of cheerleader cried, Coach would buy the boys pizza and throw a celebration party for them.

And, yeah, it gets even worse.

“Turn left onto Chamberlain Pike for 15 miles.”

There was a boy named Denny Collier who moved to Gortnerville when I was in high school. Today, I realize that Denny was on the spectrum. People in Gortnerville said he was “odd turned” or “retarded”. There were two people in town who befriended Denny. I was one of them and the other was Leah Laughlin, a cheerleader and probably the prettiest girl in the county.

Denny was enamored with Leah. Always telling her that he loved her and that she was “purdy”. Leah’s boyfriend was the afore mentioned Kenny Wallers, now an All District point guard on our high school’s basketball team and a very popular guy at the high school. Kenny was always telling Denny to stay away from Leah and calling him vile names. Kenny was always surrounded by his own personal goon squad, three or four big guys, members of the football and wrestling team and, while I wanted to stand up for my pal, Denny, I’m ashamed to say that I was too cowardly.

One warm spring day, Denny’s body was found on the banks of Muskie Creek. Somebody had bashed his skull with a rock and killed my friend.

Leah Laughlin went to Easter State like I did. One night, in my dorm room, I held her in my arms while she cried. She told me that she was sure Kenny and his pals had killed Denny.

Naturally, she eventually married Kenny. She works as a math teacher at Gortnerville Elementary while Kenny sells drugs and licks food stamps.

It don’t get any worse than that.

“In 2 miles, merge right onto Pioneer Parkway”

Alright, now, I’m getting there, I thought. I actually pumped my fist in the air!

It seemed like the two miles to Pioneer Parkway took an hour. I turned on the radio. AM was nothing but talk shows. I’m probably the only guy in the world who thinks this way, but when anybody discusses Donald Trump, pro or con, they all sound like raving lunatics to me. I switched to FM and found a station that was playing Earl Thomas Conley. Earl’s smooth baritone voice made everything seem alright.

“Merge right onto Pioneer Parkway for 24 miles.”

It would be smooth sailing from here. The Bluegrass State is notorious for lousy roads, but Pioneer Parkway is a fairly new highway and had aspeed limit of 70. I cranked up the radio. Now, they were playing Diamond Rio, another favorite.

I looked at the clock on the car’s console. It was 11:20. Plenty of time to get there. My interview was for a paralegal position at O’ Rourke and Shouse, a law firm that handled a wide variety of cases. The attorney interviewing me would be Oliver Shouse. He seemed to be the type of guy who would be impressed by an early arrival.

Again, it seemed to take forever before I heard the feminine voice of the GPS speak the words I longed to hear.

“In one mile, take EXIT 22 for Easter/Guilley Station.”

I let out a war whoop as I took exit 22.

“At the end of the ramp, turn left onto Ghost Creek Road for 11.2 miles.”

I made the turn. I remembered that when I was in college, many of my classmates would come out to Ghost Creek to party. I didn’t do parties. I was interested in getting my degree and getting out of Gortnerville!

Ghost Creek turned out to be a pretty desolate place. The road was lined with trees, mostly sycamore and poplar. I passed a few cabins that appeared to be abandoned. I glanced at the clock. It was 11:40. I should have been there in ten minutes.

The radio continued playing. Steve Wariner, Conway Twitty, the Oak Ridge Boys, Garth Brooks. Gosh, shouldn’t I have been there by then?

Clint Black, Martina McBride, Vince Gill. The clock said noon. I surely had gone 11.2 miles by this point. I looked down the road ahead. There was an old gas station. A truck was parked where pumps had once been. The hood was up and somebody was working under it. I gave a signal and pulled off in front of the old station. The place obviously had been out of business a while. The paint was peeling off the building and some of the windows were broken out.

The guy working on the truck was missing most of his teeth and the few he had were discolored. His clothes were dirty.

“Hey, can ya help me out?” I asked.

“I think I got a bad fuel pump here,” he spat the words more than saying them. “I need help, I ain’t in the mood to give it!”

“Look, if you can tell me whether or not I’m getting close to Easter, Kentucky, or not< I’ll give you a ride there!”

“You one of them college professors?” he asked. His tone of voice when he said “college professors” was what most people reserved for “rattlesnake” or “rat”.

He continued, “Yeah, you got that way about yourself. Like your sewer don’t stink! Why don’t you git?”

I realized that I was wasting my time there.

“Sorry to bother you,” I said. “Good luck with the truck.”

I climbed back into my little car. As I pulled back onto the road, I saw him hold his middle finger in the air and say something. I couldn’t hear him and I’m no lip reader.

I drove down the road, I’d look at the clock from time to time and would also look at the odometer. I drove another twenty miles. It was 12:05. The radio played on. Randy Travis, George Jones, Neal McCoy, Little Texas, Alan Jackson, John Michael Montgomery.

12:30. No town in sight. I was getting desperate. I punched the phone button on the console. I scrolled down to Rourke and Shouse’s number and called it.

“Rourke and Shouse, Attorneys at Law. Selena speaking. How may I help you?”

“Selena, it’s Don Royal. I have a 1:00 with Mr. Shouse. Is he in?”

“Yes, he ate lunch in his office today. Would you like to speak with him?”

“Yes ma’am,” I said, trying not to sound like a nervous wreck.

I waited for what seemed like an hour. Then, I heard Mr. Shouse’s deep voice. The Eastern Kentucky accent was there despite his best efforts.

“Hey, Donnie, you still comin’?”

“Yessir, I’m on my way, but the dangdest thing is happening!”

“What’s up, son?”

“ I got off the Parkway at Exit 22. Got on Ghost Creek Road. And I been on this road for over an hour and Easter ain’t nowhere in sight!”

“Shoot, son,I don’t know what you’ve done. After about ten minutes, you should have came to a four way stop. Turning left would have brought you right into town. You don’t remember that from when you were in college here?”

The man sounded exasperated. And honestly, I hadn’t seen a single stop sign or stoplight since I had been on this road!

“I honestly never came out this way, to be honest.”

“Look, let me be honest with you, bud. You’re exactly what this firm needs. This job is yours to lose! But if we can’t count on you to show up for the job interview…”

The connection was breaking up.

“I’m sorry, sir, I’m losing you!”

Then, his voice came back.

“Nothing scheduled until 2:30. If you can get here by then…”

The next sound that I heard was a dial tone.

I didn’t know what to do. It seemed futile to turn around and go in the other direction.

I decided to keep driving.

That’s what I’m doing now. The clock says 1:43. Now, my surroundings begin to look vaguely familiar. There’s a Mail Pouch barn ahead on the right. Reminds me of old Shep Collier’s place. There’s the farmhouse with the red metal roof. It was red shingles for years, but Shep went to metal last spring after he had a bunch of leaks over the winter. There’s a road sign around the bend.

WELCOME TO GORTNERVILLE, KENTUCKY: A FRIENDLY LITTLE TOWN!

POPULATION 999(and room for more!)

It does get worse, after all!