City of Smothered Hope

Sleep came in fits, like the first patches of fog moving in to engulf the night. Rest never came easy in this place... this city of smothered hope and lies. I’d tried flipping through some shoddy, local art rag to enhance my fatigue but it had only served to fuel anxiety. It was just another local click’s flak, the same as everything else in this forsaken place, a soulless relic of decades that had long since past with no hope of affecting anything outside of its own circle. To hell with it, I thought, the only way this half sized magazine would expand my mind was to use it as a rolling tray. Now I was curled in a fetal position under the sheets trying to match the soft, low frequency hum of my high, hoping to lure the sandman into my room.
The dream began peacefully enough. I was driving through Kentucky down I-65 south from Bowling Green. There was a half empty case of Pabst in the floorboard on the passengers side and a cold can cradled between my legs. The radio was playing a John Prine song - I think it was Jesus, the Missing Years. I remember thinking to myself that ‘it was time’ as I reached into the glovebox, fumbling past an empty bottle of Tylox from Mexico, pulling out a small tinfoil square. A single, white sugar cube revealed itself as I unwrapped the foil. Its presence made me jittery and nervous, like a cop asking questions about things that you know in your heart aren’t his business. I threw the cube into my mouth cruntching it, disolving it and washing its metalic sweetness back with half warm beer.
Its effects were almost immediate, butterflies in the stomach, shortness of breath and sounds becoming ever more acute in their space. I drank the rest of the beer and then another, mashing the accelerator closer and closer to the floor trying to catch up with the road ahead. I rolled the window down for fresh air and began tossing the empty cans out, listening to their hollow ping dissappear down the highway behind me. The music on the radio swirled louder, faster, driving mechanized rythems, like some full-throttled hillbilly racecar from hell.
Past Dueling Grounds and over the state line, grinning, knowing I was the great god Pan bearing down on Nashville to release my chaos. “Well howdy ya’ll! Why yes, I do play music. I have these here pipes.”
I was now laughing hysterically at the thought. Tears streamed down my face, blurring the road, transforming it into two vertical clown eyes peering over the hood of my car. I popped open another beer and slammed it back quickly. It tasted clean as water and sweeter than mother’s milk. It was, in fact, such a satifactory experience that I drank another to re-live the moment.
A yellow sign announced there was the possibility of strong crosswinds for the next mile and a half. But it was unimportant because I was now flying over my car in weightless freedom. Suddenly it was before me. Rivergate - that perfect model for southern, suburban white trast imbreeding and ignorance. I held a set of pipes between two cloven hooves and blew a marvelous, dissonant cacaphony across the landscape. With that my car exploded below me. It was a beautiful, billowy, naplam-like explosion that seared across the terrain engulfing everything in sight. The mall exploded outward like a house in a catagory 5 tornado. It’s inhabitants leaving a smarmy, smoldering ooze encrusted with Hilfiger and Nike emblems.
The cloud of fire surged across the Cumberland River and around Briley Parkway swallowing up a touristy RV park leaving dumbfounded, pear-shaped men and women running, trailing boiling skin behind them. The Opryland hotel complex went up in a mushroom cloud releasing the angst of thousands of immegrent workers and the tension of tousands of bullshit conventions into the upper atmosphere creating an eerie phosphorous glow from horizen to horizen. The force of the blast eliminated shopprey land with the sharp sound of a banjo twang. The overall effect caused a swelling in my groin filling me with a lust for more.
The firestorm crawled across a train tresle expanding into Shelby Bottoms incinerating several people on rollerblades as it balloned out across East Nashville. Here it engulfed an aging crowd of wanna be’s and hipsters, not to mention the whole of Nashville’s lesbian community, with a sizzling hiss. It might have gone unnoticied as it was the only sound this crowd had ever made. As the blaze crossed the projects towards the collusium, huslers on the corner glowed like burning crack rocks clenching smoldering, yellow K4’s in their fist. From above, the flaming collusium looked much like a firey vagina,one that could hold seventy thousand screaming dickheads.
For the third and final time the inferno crossed the Cumberland River and in one quick swipe it eliminated the issue of what to do with the thermal plant, leaving a bubbling cauldren of waste to drain into the river, steaming like a warm turd on a cool spring night. The cars jammed along Second Avenue and Broadway exploded in a chain reaction like a string of firecrackers. The skyline fell behind a cloud of black smoke and fire leaving the puny capitol building exposed for overtaking. The blaze engulfed the courthouse, capitol and police station simultainiously, filling the air with the sweet smell of barbequed pork. It made me consider for a moment that maybe Mary’s Ribs should be spared this judgement but I knew in my heart of hearts that all of Jefferson Street must go. Mary’s would just have to suffer the martyrdom of collateral damage.
I licked my lips and raised my pipe once again as I turned my eyes towards music row. I wanted the fire to burn slowly here, inflicting the same anguish and pain their system had inflicted on others for decades now. Like chart fixers gone sideways with their payola money, a shotgun-quick death was too good for this confection of hacks and reptiles bleeding the system of creative blood leaving only a hollow corpse called pop-country. I blew a silly twelve bar progression with atonal overtones imagining it written in the idiot proof Nashville Number System. The very force of it caused the Country Music Hall of Fame to curle up and collapse, freeing the spirit of Hank Williams so that he could finaly rest in peace.
The apocalyptic blaze encircled music row torching trendy overpriced resturants from the gultch, up 21st Avenue to Hillsboro Village releasing a hot cloud of cocaine gas. It was like the worlds largest base pipe. Hundreds of pounds of coke in the pockets of waitresses, kitchen workers and patrons of these whore filled establishments rained down burning. It caused many of the squishy soft students of Belmont University and David Lipscum to die instantly of heart attacts. It was a sight that would have given Jesus a hard-on.
Now 16th and 17th Avenues were surrounded by a ring of fire that was slowly closing in on the inhabitants. Producers and freshly signed ‘talent’ came running out of studios and offices, their pants still around their ankles, semen still dripping from their chins. Rubes and confounded L.A. imported schmucks flailed about trying to pull melting cell phones away from their ears, ripping away hunks of flesh and hair to reveal a hollow skull, no brains, only a single, programmable chip inside. Dozens of bimbos, who just moments before had been Nashville’s next rising star, ran clawing at their breast desperately hoping to wretch the boiling silicon bubbles from inside them. Finally, the whole of music row burned away like the pages of a press release thrown into a flaming grill.
The inferno moved southward through Green Hills and Brentwood. The acrid smell of melting plasic from the thousands of over used credit cards made my eyes water and choked me. There was no money to burn here. Just over extended lines of credit used in hopes of appearing to be affluent, the outward semblance of being a class above. Cheekwood exploded in a violent blast from the hot gas and manure that had been building in its stalls and galleries. It smelled of the pretentious poppycock of an old, southern, white country club; a vapid and artless gathering of the already dead, toasting their achivement in separation.
The fire smoldered on to the site of the 840 loop in Franklin. As I looked across the charred landscape that sprawled out behind me, I was filled with gleeful emotions, not unlike the feelings in the hearts of the faithful on that final day of judgement. Suddenly, I noticed a single unburned spot in the center of that black barren vista. There was nothing left by which to judge its location or what it was. As I closed in on it I realized its identity. There before me stood the Walgreens on the corner of West End and 31st. I smiled knowing it was a fitting epitaph for the sell-out city that Nashville had been.

- John Valentine 2002

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