By a survivor of the Sacred Chicken
It started on a ‘rain-slick ‘any ole day’ in mid ’92, I guess. Actually it wasn’t wet from the rain but that line seemed kind of the right thing to type. Ya know? Yeah, anyway, when I moved into that whitewashed lunatic barn that I called home at 1939 Commonwealth Avenue, I can’t remember the weather or if the roads were wet, but I was excited. I was moving to Charlotte, North Carolina. A bell-of-the-ball among southern cities. Dubbed, ‘The Queen City’. Don’t let the Southern gentility fool you—it was a city caught between two identities: old-world lace, polite racism and magnolia funerals versus the new asphalt jungle of perpetual construction and cocaine. A weird town the ‘Queen City’, and full of queens too but that’s for another page. Dangerous if you let your guard down. You wouldn’t think it, but yeah. A real schizophrenic cow-town on the edge of an identity crisis.
Perfect, really.
(Wow, that line would have made Hunter proud.)
The house—Holy Shit, the house—looked like something Faulkner might have puked up in a nightmare. Or maybe a house from a Hooper & Henkel flick (tell me if you figure that reference out). A colonial Frankenstein, big and brooding with paint flaking like it had given up long ago. There was a squeaky outer screen door that opened to a heavy equally squeaky main door in the middle of this long, barely level porch that ran the width of the barn of a house. The owners, an elderly couple native to the Queen City, had chopped it up into a boarding house, smart. Small rooms, paper-thin walls, and one sad little apartment on the second floor that included its own private back entrance. I ended up in the apartment, well eventually. Lucky me.
Across the street was The Penguin diner. A well-known landmark locale complete with heroin addicts in the alley was open late and serving greasy miracles. Corner library diagonal to us, the kind of brutalist slab you’d expect to find in Soviet Prague, not Southern suburbia. But it had a great comic section, air conditioning and working toilets, so what the hell. It was once ‘Golden Dragon Kung Fu School’ and owned by Larry Hartsell, an ex Bruce Lee student & MY JKD instructor’s teacher, but that’s another story.
It didn’t take long before the characters started leaking through the cracks.
There was Lamar, our own pot smoking, opiate-loving savant. He was smart—deep, soul-shaking smart—but too dumb to realize it. Or maybe he knew and just didn’t care. Laziness IS the trait of the hillbilly. He’d quote Baldwin or Sun Tzu while fixing a busted toaster with a butter knife, then sell that same toaster for half a Percocet an hour later if he could. He spent hours watching Star Trek Next Generation, years rather. He always got me to share his favorite episodes, when he could. And this was far more often than I’d care to pretend to admit. His addiction got the better of him more often than not, but every now and then, through the haze, he’d hit on something so profound it would stop the whole room cold. Like God tapping a junkie on the shoulder and whispering secrets too heavy for sober minds. He lost his battle with his addiction with a bad heart in 2017. The tragedy of the addict-savant. Always Rook Eye, right Lamar? Always Rook Eye.
Marie was his live in girlfriend. Or maybe HE was the live-in boyfriend, cause Marie worked, Lamar did NOT. His patronage to whatever network carried STNG back then can attest to that. She had a raspy laugh from the malboro lights she enjoyed and, for whatever reason, Lamar was her world. She wasn’t too bright but she was loyal, and she kept Lamar happy. She went out and worked, brought home the bacon and fried it up in a pan (remember THAT commercial? Miss ya Ma.). She was Lamar’s beck n call girl, but she made time for us too. She held our secrets like they were coins she’d never spend. Like I said, she wasn’t oh so bright. But if she liked you (or if Lamar liked you), she would do anything for you.
But then came Karla. Karla with a K like a kick to the face. Just what I needed at the time. My, my my. She moved in a few months after I did, dragging a purple suitcase, an onion shaped ass and a soon to be ex-boyfriend with one leg. Yeah, you read that right – he had a prosthetic leg. He’ll come up again later in a different tale. So, I will explain how he lost it.
But anyway, Karla, she looked like Whitney Houston if Whitney Houston had thighs that could choke a man and a booty that worked liked 7/11 baby: 24/7. I fell hard. Hard enough to crack a rib. In all honesty, Karla with a K wasted way too much of my time, effort and money. She would have been a better one night stand. Hindsight and all aye?
We ate together, the 4 to 5 of us, depending on who’d been evicted or arrested that week. Somebody always had a pot of beans going, so to speak. Lamar made the best fried bologna sandwiches this side of the Mason-Dixon, and Marie could fry chicken like that butter lady that said the N-word. Karla with a K taught me to drop an egg in ramen noodle when I boil them. Something I advise all on a budget to this day. We laughed together, cried together. Mostly in my little apartment, with its slanted floor and stellar view of the billboard and the bend of I-77.
But all of that—the food, the laughter, the perfectly avoidable romance with Karla—would often pause in the shadow of something than would warrant pause. Something we couldn’t see yet, not fully.
George was one of those shadows.
George. A handsome, well spoken crackhead with the kind of nervous energy that makes dogs bark and babies cry. In the house when I arrived, he lived downstairs in the very first room. He never really told ME what he was about, what he did for work. For all I know he toured with FunkadelicParliament. Doubtful, the man could barely finish a sentence without sweating. Somehow I learned later that his brother was an Alderman in DC. Not sure WHAT happened to break this one.
There are a plethora of stories that emanate from this hallowed house. This monument to the depressed that no longer stands in the Queen City. But one of the earliest and certainly the darkest is the tale of George Ware. One that brought us together, in a weird way, as an eclectic family of sorts.
Now, while I don’t recall every detail in particular. I am pretty sure it was like late summer, maybe early fall.
So, like late July or August maybe Septemberish. Shit I don’t know. The usual suspects were up in my apartment, including Tim, my next door neighbor, and Gay George. We all called Gay George, Gay George, to differentiate him from the bad George. We were watching TV, cooking stew smoking dirt weed and drinking beer & gin, Karla helping me host since she moved in with me. Everyone else was just watching TV and waiting for the food. I had to use to head.
I should point out that no one upstairs had a private bathroom. There was a communal shitter, along with a tub and shower, with a window that opened to the side of the house. The sounds of the night always filled that bathroom as the window was often open after sunset. I did my business and over heard what sounded like an argument outside. I could hear George, asshole George, Gay George was up in my apartment telling lies and getting giggles, arguing about money. But I heard that loud whisper that happens when you want to be quite, but threatening. I didn’t think much of it: crackheads being crackheads. And I washed my hands, then headed back to host my guests.
We ate, watched TV, talked story ( as we used to say in Hawaii) and suddenly there sounded out through the apartment a loud knock full of authority. You kind of instinctively know who it is when you hear this thud upon your door.
Police…the popo, leo leo in Samoan street slang. 5-0. The pigs, the fuzz, the cops….the authorities.
And just like that, the party died.
I was asked if I would be so inclined as to come downstairs and identity someone. There had been an altercation
Apparently, that little argument I heard was a heated exchange between George Ware, bad George, and the quite guy that lived with his lady in the other big room downstairs. And bad George, KILLED the guy!
The man he’d killed—such a quite tenant, named Fuckifiknew,I really never knew—had owed him money, or they were smoking crack together and it got weird, or maybe he just annoyed him. Whatever happened, George snapped. Stabbed the poor bastard in the alley beside the house. The blood was pooled up in the driveway like a scene from a medieval battle field.
Bad George was in the back of a CPD car, banging his head on the window in defiance to his actions. What a dumbass.
After that, things got strange. Or stranger, I should say.
We all went to the trial, bad George’s trial for man slaughter I think. 2nd degree murder maybe? I don’t remember. I took the stand because I heard the argument. I will explain in better detail later in this majmua of stories, (tell me if you got that – shout out Rob-Dawood, miss ya brother).
Crazy days in the Queen City boy!
There was the night we all dropped acid and went to the haunted house around Halloween. Awesome night. Some freak had passed us a sheet of blotter at The Penguin. Cartoon penguins on it. How poetic.
We DROVE to the place. Karla gave me a bj in the back on the way. Lamar and Marie pretending they didn’t know what was going on. Had a blast. Had to wait FOREVER before we drove home, too high.
We lived like that—just fun in the sun, so to speak—for months.
We moved on and lived our adventures. That house stood there and embraced everything we gave. Our stories permeated those walls and, if that house was still standing, I GUARANTEE it would be haunted by our pains and our happiness and everything we felt and did within the comfort of it’s hallowed halls. 1939 Commonwealth Avenue. I want to say I miss you, but I don’t. I just remember your ghosts.
But they can’t kill the ghosts.
I used to dream about that place sometimes. About the dinners. The laughter. The long nights with Karla talking about the stars and whether aliens had soul music or how they liked to fuck.
I dream about George too. And Fuckifiknew. And what makes a man finally snap. And how a man can die and have no one to bury him, or remember his name. I will talk about Fuckifiknew later to impress that upon you.
But most of all, I dream about the souls that filled those rooms. Coming and going. Stories in abundance.
That house changed my life.
No. Those souls changed my life.
We weren’t family. We weren’t (always) friends. We were something else—survivors of the same deranged experiment in Southern urban chaos. A boarding house of misfits, dreamers, and killers, caught in a time warp between crack vials and Clinton’s America.
People always ask me why I stayed so long in that mansion of mayhem. I tell them the truth:
Because for a little while—just a flicker of madness—I was home.
POSTSCRIPT: THE AFTERMATH
Years later, I drove back down Commonwealth Avenue. The Penguin was still there, sort of. Renovated beyond recognition. Clean booths. Craft beers. No soul. The library had added a spot called Cilantro’s. Even the trees looked tired.
But 1939? The house? Gone. Just a parking lot now. Smooth and paved over like a scar that got surgery. No plaque. No memory. Nothing.
Except me.
I’m the last witness to the house that time forgot. The house that took in the freaks and gave them purpose. The house that gave me Lamar, Marie and Karla. The house that gave me murder. The house that gave me everything.
Charlotte may have forgotten, but I haven’t.
Some nights, when the bourbon’s flowing and the music’s low (HA – I don’t even drink!), I close my eyes and see us again—laughing in that faded kitchen. Marie’s fried chicken on the stove. Lamar rolling a joint. Karla dancing barefoot on the shredded linoleum.
And for one perfect second, I’m home again.
God help me.
But I miss it.
Every. Goddamn. Day.
