cellini's Diaryland Diary

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The Way it Was

I don't recall when I first met Jehu. He was one of many characters on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville in 1994 when I started working there at a succession of jobs that included counter guy at a 1950's style malt shop, interning at the local newspaper, pulling shots as a barista, working at a second-run movie venue in a dilapidated former vaudeville theater, helping to run a weekly concert series, and sitting in an information kiosk talking to tourists.

Jehu was a dapper man in his fifties, around 5'5" with silver hair and the accent and patience of an old-school New Yorker. He was a senior manager at a financial information firm who socialized with the musicians, artists, writers and other assorted weirdos that washed up downtown at the time.

He had a way of talking to you without looking directly into your eyes and pulling out a tube of Chapstick every few minutes.

Jehu had come of age as a student at Columbia in the 1960's. He'd been friends with Lou Reed, declined to be photographed by Mapplethorpe, was close with Odetta, on the list at Studio 54, and was at least a nodding acquaintance of Andy Worhol's.

This was the time of grunge and coffee shops and poetry slams and underground newspapers. There was something cool going on with the kids and this guy who had been part of a youth movement wanted to check in on what was happening.

"You doing well?" he would always greet me (and still does). There would be a brief opportunity to respond and then you would get Jehu-ed. A very few comments on my own part would be required and then he would launch into a monologue that would range from artists in the East Village to the dangers of heroin addiction to how to put together the best party ever.

At the time, I was studying Egyptian heiroglyphics and writing a lot and dabbling in local politics. My fraternal twin brother, Waldo, was publishing an independent 'zine and riding around on rollerblades. For whatever reason, Jehu decided that we deserved to be allowed into the outer ring of the inner circle.

In early December, we were invited to our first of a series of celebrations and parties at the commune where Jehu lived about 30 minutes outside of town.

"The Gathering" was a group of about a dozen New Yorkers who had come together during the 1970's under the tutelage of Tom Ringrose and his wife, Isis. Some, like Jehu, seemed to be over-educated rebels who had done a certain amount of drugs and then decided to look for something better.

Tom had studied to be an Anglican priest but then somehow been drafted into the Vietnam War and then become simply a very good man who wanted to bring like-minded people together in a sort of interdisciplinary faith. He was regarded by the group's members as a psychic and perhaps as a prophet. I wasn't sure about all of that, but I felt certain that he was a very good man.

The first time I arrived at The Gathering I was blown away by the place where they lived. It was a former hospital in Schyuler, Virginia, built out of soapstone bricks. they had bought the place for a song in the late 70's and completely remodeled it. Jehu was a financial information analyst at work, but he was a master carpenter at home. They had turned this place into a bewitching and perfectly crafted palace with gorgeous woodwork, shelves lined with fascinating old books, amazing artwork on the walls, and a series of rooms that challenged and astounded the visitor. The scent of frankiscence and myrr filled the air.

Hundreds of people came through for the big Christmas party. They had taken acres around the place and decorated the landscape with an elaborate mosaic of lights.

A sitting room held a number of Faberge eggs. "Those are from Isis's family," Jehu explained. Isis had a moderate Russian accent. If you told me she was Anastasia, I would probably believe it.

At the Gathering I socialized with scholars, artists and minor European royalty. It was a wonderful collection of people.

And then a week later my brother and I were invited to their annual New Year's Day dinner, and we were permitted to bring our family along.

I can't imagine what my parents thought of the situation. We were bringing them along as our plus-twos to a fancy dinner at a sumptuous home full of friends we'd made on our own. There were only about twenty people at the table, which included a sitting member of Congress with his family as well as a professional golfer and various other luminaries.

Over five courses, I discussed campaign finance policy with the Congressman and Mayan architecture with the professional golfer. I was 16 years old.

Five years later, Tom Ringrose performed the ceremony where I married my wife. And only a few years after that, he passed away. Jehu and many of the other members of The Gathering moved out to live in their own homes.

I don't know what compelled these people to embrace a few ne'er do well kids from the Downtown Mall into their company. All throughout my teens, the Gathering Christmas and New Years parties were an important part of my life.

Rumors persisted that Jehu was a gangster or a pedophile, but I never saw any sign of that in my relationship with him.

Years later, I wrote several books and made an arguably important film. I started a movement of locavore hunters, and I worked for the Smithsonian and gave lectures all over the country and spent a year as a civil rights journalist. It took a few decades, but eventually I became the sort of person who actually belonged at a gathering by The Gathering.

Was Tom a psychic? I don't know, but he sure saw something in me.

Chap's

Tony LaBua owned Chap's Ice Cream in Charlottesville, Virginia. Chap's was a 1950's style ice cream parlor with a soda fountain, ice cream that we made right there in the store, and all bills paid in cash.

I don't know what it was that possessed me to ask Tony for a job except that this was where the cool kids hung out.

Tony had a thick Long Island accent and looked after every penny that came in or out of the place. I think I made about $4.35 an hour.

Everything I experienced in working for Tony makes a lot more sense when you put it in the context that I only learned about a year ago -- that Tony had to go on the run from the NYC mob in the 80's and Charlottesville was where he ended up and they weren't gonna follow him.

"I spent twenty years in the wholesale seafood business," was the phrase that we heard from Tony more often than anything else. In the end of the age of a dangerous New York and the still-feral Fulton Fish Market, the terms of his departure are best known to himself.

Tony had some former player for the Washington Redskins who was running odd jobs for him at that point. The guy would sprawl out in the back booth for hours.

The staff at the time included myself, a seven-foot-tall giant named Brook, a former East-Village hippie named Grace, a cleaning guy named Charles, Dave, who worked the grill, and Scott, the former owner of a failed comic book store.

Grace was engaged to a man in prison named Louis. He was locked up for burglary and somehow in her mind Louis was innocent and could do no wrong.

"He was drunk and his friend was going in through the window and Louis was just sitting on the curb and then his friend threw him the wallet and ran away," Grace insisted.

I'm told she was svelte when she started working at Chaps, but she put on a good 50 pounds what with the ice cream.

Charles was a very gay, somewhat heavyset black man who was about half-way in the closet. He told stories after hours about Dave Matthews sucking dick at Club 216 a few years earlier.

"I feel used," he would say, looking up at me in a flirtatious way while mopping the floors.

Dave was a ponytailed guy in his late twenties with a gruff voice who sometimes set up an easel on the Downtown Mall and did charictatures for a bounty.

Dave had a hot Colombian girlfriend and we got along well. My hot girlfriend probably had something to do with it. They invited us as guests to Club 216, Charlottesville's members-only gay club at the time.

I drank there easily even at the age of 17 and then we stepped out into the parking lot to smoke Dave's weed. I had little faith in the stuff, having smoked it a few times before without effect.

Suddenly, I was transported back into the lobby of a hotel in Orlando -- Wilson World -- where I'd visited as an eight year old kid visiting Disney World. I was sitting in the hot tub and watching the capsule of a glass elevator move upwards.

Holy shit, I was stoned.

Tony kept a baseball bat under the cash register. He wasn't crazy.

The local crazies flocked to Chap's. especially in the mornings. The local social services organization for the mentally ill -- Region Ten -- dosed their patients nearby and they would drift into Chap's for coffee and company.

Bob Hastings claimed that he was former Navy and had served on nuclear submarines as a nurse or medic. His hopes for the future mostly hinged on the recently-divorced Patricia Kluge. He wore glasses with flip-up sunglasses and had a beer belly and like most of the crazies he smoked constantly. He was schizophrenic and a very nice man. He had a credit account at Chap's that was paid off monthly by someone.

Bhudda Phil wore slouch hats and had the posture and fat belly of a budda statue. He also smoked constantly, was another social services case, and would arrive early in the morning at Chap's to drink coffee and confer with Bob.

The story that was told about Budda Phil was that he used to be a normal guy but did a LOT of acid in college and never came back. I don't know that this was true. But Budda Phil had this very simplistic, child-like perspective on everything. He would come up with these statements that were very Budda-like. He would approach me and ask how I was doing and give very simple advice on how to live my life, which was actually very rational and wise.

One Thanksgiving Day, my brother and a friend went to visit Budda Phil at his subsidized apartment. He picked up a guitar and I'm told that he played the most incredible, haunting blues that either of them has ever heard.

Budda Phil had several slouch hats that he rotated through. He would mail them home to his mother in Maryland, who cleaned them and mailed them back.

I remember in the spring of 1996 Phil was gone for a week. He'd been walking by the side of the road and spied some mushrooms.

"They looked so good!" he told me later.

He'd eaten these random mushrooms growing by the side of the road, grown delerious, fallen and hit his face badly on the ground and needed to be hospitalized for poisoning and for trauma.

For the rest of his life he had this enormous body of scar tissue on the bridge of his nose.

Bob and Phil and other crazies would sit in a booth in Chap's in the morning and have bizarre conversations. Like whether the greys (aliens) would allow elections after they are in charge. And once they conferred with a guy who had two tear drop tattoos on his cheek as to whether the Queen's Book of Etiquette is the most important book ever written (no such book exists).
Tony paid me at the end of every week in a sealed envelope from the local bank containing the cash sum of my minimum wages. He smoked cigars in the back. He had a wife who did Jazzercize and had a few step-daughters.

One time I thought it would be a good idea to fuck my girlfriend (later wife) bent over the prep table. We went back to my parents' house, where I would typically sleep in my bedroom and she would creep up to a guest room. At around 2 am I realized that we had tossed the used condom on the top of the trash. We had to sneak out, drive all the way back into town, retrieve and properly dispose of the condom, and then get back into the house as quietly as possible.

New Years Eve was a huge night at Chap's. Thousands and thousands of people crammed on to the Downtown Mall for "First Night," which was an allegedly alcohol-free option for people to spend the biggest drinking night of the year.

I prepared well, by wearing a nice white oxford and black tails and walking right into one of the two local places with craft beer and wine to buy an assortment of alcohol. I am told that I looked like a grad student at the time.

Then I walked to the far end of the Downtown Mall and secured a hotel room for the night at the Omni Hotel for $150 in cash. I don't know what they were thinking.

We were slammed that night. It was a blur of ice cream and milkshakes. But around 11 pm we knocked off and I walked up to the Omni where my stash was waiting.

This was my first experience with a completely shaved snatch. My fiance had gotten into the tub and shorn it all off before climbing up on the bed. I still remember the taste and smell of a freshly-shorn woman.

Somehow, we ended up on the roof after midnight and I had to be carefully shepherded through the elevator and down the hall back to our room.

I have absolutely no recollection as to what explanation I gave to my parents for where I was that New Years Eve.

Brook was a laconic giant. Over seven feet tall, perpetually stoned, Brook just wanted to sell everyone weed and go to sleep. He had a younger brother who idealized him and wore a ball cap with "Dopey" from the Seven Dwarfs.

Brook had been expelled from UVA over an incident that involved him being invited to a party at the University President's home and then removing his pants, among further shenanigans. A bright future, snuffed over indecent exposure.

I never had much to do with Brook at the time, but apparently he married a girl I knew from high school. And after they broke up, I dated her and she faked a pregnancy, and I now feel a greater level of sympathy with Brook than I ever did before.

When Louis got out of prison Grace decided to introduce him to society. This included setting up a photo session, wherein I comically imitated the model "Fabio." We did a whole photo session, me with my long hair at the time, and this with who-the-fuck-knows-what destination for the product. Louis took photos at Grace's direction.

Tony still owns Chap's. The second floor had a roof leak a long time ago and he had to rip out the flooring above and balance his Coca Cola memorabilia carefully on the rafters above. He must own the building because otherwise that piece of real estate would have been sold years ago and turned into a steak house or a bespoke cocktail bar.

Tony uses a cane now. The price of a milkshake has crept up close to six dollars. The Gambinos are gone. And one day he'll be gone, and that Jazzercize wife of his will clean up with the price of that place, even if it isn't cash.

Up in the Old Theater

It was our teenaged playground. We played Mazzy Star over the loudspeakers while cleaning out
popcorn and soda cups. Huge dramas played out under those lights, among those seats, on that stage.

Things were smoked in those projection booths.

The Jefferson Theater was a locus of my teenaged life in Charlottesville. At a time when it was still asecond run film bridge between it's blackface, vaudeville period and the current, pretty-famous period that you know it for.

In the mid-nineties I was a would-be overachieving student at Murray High School. Learning to read Egyptian Hierglyphics and applying for early admission to Hampshire College. In my junior year I had one critical requirement to pin down while I tried to woo Hampshire into letting me in early: the internship.

I applied to the C-ville Weekly for an internship with a bright past of writing much of the material for the Murray school paper. I was quickly assigned the job of sitting on the floor and sorting through years of the paper's archive of stock photos, a duty which would fill most of my hours with the paper during this first early stint. This was while Christopher Reeve was paralyzed at a nearby horse-riding event and Superman himself was sequestered at UVA hospital. A hive of freaking out surrounded me. In the midst of this, I happened to mention to then-editor and founder Hawes Spencer that I was also looking for a paying job.

Within hours he had set me up with my first shift at the Jefferson Theater, then a second run theater that ran one past-prime film in the main theater and a second, even less desired, film in the theater carved out in what had once been the second floor balcony. There was also a walled-off former third level balcony, but we'll get to that later.

The first thing that Chris Hlad ever said to me as I sidled up into the ticket booth, near the popcorn stand, was, "a good time will be had by all." Chris wrote this down on a piece of paper by way of training. He jammed it up against the glass of the popcorn stand as a reminder. I was 16 years old, filled with ideas of being a professional journalist and didn't know what to make of any of this. Chris had a hallowed status at the Jefferson. The story was that years earlier, shortly after Hawes had bought the collapsing place, Chris had saved it.

At the time, in the early nineties, the Downtown Mall was kinda dead. Millers brought some people out to drink and hear bands, but the Mall was mostly a collection of crappy junk shops and a Woolworths and an Omni Hotel that just hoped something better was on the way. The Mall still had the DNA of the old East Main Street that had been bricked over out of desperation in the late 1970's. You could still buy a muffler there.

Chris Hlad was walking past the Jefferson -- mostly recently remembered as a pornographic theater, turned into a somewhat more respectable second run movie theater by Hawes -- when he noticed smoke through the windows. Chris sought out a pay phone (remember those), called 911, and saved the building (erected in 18XX as a vaudeville theater), earning Hawes' gratitude.
What did good Chris need when Hawes spoke with his savior? A place to live. And Hawes gave it to him. The blocked-off third balcony became Chris' home for indefinite years, rent-free, owing to the service rendered.

Chris' domain was a surrealist's idea of an apartment. We had to walk across long stacks of vinyl
records in the rows between folding seats to get between the areas designated as living room, bedroom, etc. I still have no idea where he showered.
I managed to fit right into the strange world of the Jefferson after my first awkward night. We could play CDs while cleaning up and I put on Bauhaus, The Wolfgang Press and The Breeders.
The screen hung down over the main stage and less-than-recent films played upon it. Behind that creen, there was allegedly an asbestos curtain that would flutter enough flakes to kill everyone on the block if it was released. And behind that was a stage and a backstage and something above the stage that defied imagination.

There was a substantial stage area behind the screen, and then below stairs there was a catacombs of rooms ripe for the imagination. Three vaudeville-era dressing rooms, with a single bathroom between them. And then an ultra-creepy network of chambers reaching back under Water Street, into the damp regions that damply demonstrated why "Water Street" was called "Water Street." The last of these chambers was, at the time, nicknamed, "Russell's Old Room," after a scene in "Pulp Fiction."

A parade of people near the bottom of society at the time populated the old vaudeville dressing rooms.Each was probably around 120'x100'. God-bless-him, Hawes rented each of these shoeboxes for only $100 a month. Among the residents I recall my friend Dan, who was a 15 year old high school drop out who was (badly) growing pot in his unit, but later went on to found a multi-million dollar software company. And Sally Rose, the brilliant musician and front-woman of Shagwuf, the best band that has ever come out of Charlottesville, lived in one of those cubes as a child with a sibling and her mother, who sold flowers on the Downtown Mall and kept them in a fridge behind the asbestos curtain.

There, in the 'cubes,' marginal life thrived even as rents soared on the Mall proper, thanks not only to Hawes but also to Gabe Silverman making downtown cool through his patronage of Live Arts, and tech companies like Kesmai and Boxer bringing crowds into the restaurants and art galleries on the Mall.

And today, some of the people who lived there still make Charlottesville a good place to be.
My best friend at the time, Lars, got hired on my recommendation as a projectionist. And then another good friend, Jessie, was hired to work the front with me.

An important duty was the prevention of drinking alcohol in the theaters. We were on top of that. Our
scrappy band of 17 year-olds duly confiscated every 40-ounce and liquor bottle brought into the
establishment and properly disposed of it through our bloodstreams.

Jessie and I became obsessive about cleaning the place up, and she and I scrubbed old grease from the vending area and wiped dust from the venerable old lighting fixtures. We drank cheap vodka through screenings of "Pulp Fiction" and then spent late nights blasting Mazzy Star while trying to make the original flooring visible with Pine Sol.

We literally watched "Pulp Fiction" on that screen at least 40 times together. "Braveheart" was also screening at the time and we saved that for serious cleaning nights.

It was only a matter of time until Lars and I got curious about what was going on over our heads.
Backstage, there was a wooden ladder with many broken rungs going up to go-knew-what.
The building was terrifically high from the outside. We had scaled it along the outside. Mostly. You could duck out along the fire escapes on the second balcony and move around one level of the roof for the building and surrounding buildings. On hot summer days, the dips in the flat roof on that level made for pools. When a storm would come down, the dips would fill up with big pools up to three feet deep that we would swim in, marveling that the roof didn't cave in below. Let me tell you: you get yourself sideways, look out along the edge, peeking over at the oblivious tourists walking by, then do a few laps in an improbable roof-top pool, and then dry off and take tickets for Pulp Fiction, and you are living in peak 1995.

But from the inside, the height didn't match up. We knew that the building was taller on the outside than it seemed on the inside. And the backstage broken ladder to infinity looked like the key to solving that.

Lars and I were both rockclimbers, though Lars was admittedly more dedicated than I was. I had
survived a three week Outward Bound course not long before, where I'd learned the basics. Lars also worked a shift at a climbing gym and was way ahead of me. But we both had harnesses and climbing shoes. We set about that broken ladder like it was El Capitan.

We went up over the dusty, wooden ledge and into the strange country directly over the main seats of the theater. A series of bizarre shapes took form. They seemed like paper machete heads. Vague outlines of old props emerged.

We moved along the frail, wooden framework through this landscape of old props and molded body parts until we found another ladder and climbed up it. The rungs were caked in something stiff and crusty.

At the top, we emerged on to a new roof top. Above the heights we'd seen out of the fire escapes. This was within a dove cote. A small shelter with a roof, filled with the crusty nests of pigeons. This was the top. The peak that we'd seen from the ground and never known how to get to. I looked at a wall beside me and dug away into a layer of grime. A cocooned pigeon's egg stared up at me through what I had pulled back. Dead, preserved.

Had anyone been up here in decades? Did anyone even know what was here? It was pigeons. A
monstrous great height, and a lot of very cross pigeons.

We made our way back down to the stage.

Jessi and I went off to college. Lars went off to Burning Man. Chris had to leave his balcony when the place was sold.

And now? I still get the old itch when I step inside for a concert. The sense of unexplored netherregions. This sprawling, historic building with it's strange catacombs and challenging rooftops and awkward middleparts. In all of their remodelling, they can't have been through the whole thing, can they

Transformer Girl

“So the crazy thing is that Jazz was actually just in the G1 series in the eighties and wasn't even in the newer ones,” Rogue says. “But he's still this huge favorite of the fans. He's obviously my favorite”

Rogue clicked the electric trimmers back on and carefully buzzed the hair at the nape of my neck down to a stubble of peach fuzz. “And then they had that contest to vote for which old Transformers character should be added to the new movie and of course Jazz won. But Michael Bay does not understand Jazz's character at all.”

Through the mirror, I watched a shower of fine brown hairs tumble on to the plastic smock covering my shoulders. I could see Rogue standing behind me with a comb in one hand and the electric trimmers in the other. Her usual shock of blue hair in the center of an otherwise brunette mane had been freshened up into a new cut.

“The fans care so much about Jazz because he cares so much about humans. And plus he's just awesome, of course. So then Michael Bay went and killed him in the movie, which just goes to show that the Michael Bay movies are not what Transformers is really about. The fan community does not accept them. Not completely.”

Rogue wears black glasses and has a tall figure not unlike the Rogue of Marvel's X-Men. She cuts my hair every week or two. If I come in when she isn't working, nobody else is allowed to cut it. One time that happened and the girl filling in for her screwed up the Peaky Blinders line around the back and sides of my head and made it uneven. Rogue was furious.

The screwed-up-line girl was working two chairs away while Rogue was telling me about Transformers.

“What would happen if someone showed up at a Transformers convention dressed as a GoBot?” I asked.

“Oh my God, that would not happen,” Rogue said. “I mean, on one level people would think that was kind of awesome. Because, like, seriously!”

I looked over at the screwed-up-line girl and caught her staring at us, standing still. She pretended to look in another direction.

“But really, we just don't even acknowledge Go-Bots so people would have to give you shit about it. You could technically do that at Bot-Con because its all Hasbro now. But nobody would dare. It would be a pretty easy costume to do. They're so human-like. Not like building my Jazz costume where I have to do mechanical hands and make myself seven feet tall. But I've already told you all about that.”

She pulled the smock off. “Ok, to the sink.”

I obediently sat down at the sink and leaned my head back for the hot water.

“Scrubby scrubby!” Rogue announced as she began to knead shampoo into my hair. “I have about twenty six thousand dollars into my Transformers collection at this point. You're looking at me like I'm crazy, right?”

“Of course not,” I assured her. “I assume you are getting twenty six thousand dollars worth of satisfaction out of it? I mean, people spend more than that on gambling or customizing their Honda Civics or whatever.”

“Right,” she nodded and pushed her glasses up. “And these are grown-up toys for grown-ups. Back to the chair!” She rubbed my head dry with a towel.

I returned to the raised chair. Screwed-up-line girl was staring at me again. Our eyes met for a second and then she looked down and frowned.

“The stuff you see in toy stores is plastic crap. I only buy the good ones that you can only get online or at cons. Some of them are third party and some of them are Hasbro but third party is sometimes better because they will put out a figure for a character that Hasbro hasn't and then that sort of forces Hasbro to put out an official one.” She looked at me carefully and began making adjustments with a pair of scissors.

“These are die-cast steel and resin. Sometimes they even have lights that come on. They're all a lot bigger than the ones you see in toy stores. They are obviously worth a lot more.”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “How can third party manufacturers be making this stuff? Can't Hasbro just sue them?”

“No, of course not. They just don't use the real names and they don't put the Autobot or Decepticon stickers on them. So Hasbro can't really do much. It's just a high quality model transforming robot without any copyright violations. Hasbro has the rights to the toys but Marvel used to have the rights to represent them in comic books but then IDW has the rights now and then Hasbro Japan also has some rights to make stuff. So nobody has all of the rights and nobody can really do anything about the third party stuff.”

Rogue put the scissors down, wiped some product from a jar and began playing with my hair.

“Do people ever put the real stickers on them?” I asked.

“Of course. That's obviously the first thing you do. Hasbro basically has to sell the stickers because the old ones peel off of the official toys sometimes and people need to replace them with something.”

She gave my head a final rub. I stood up.

“There, you're all set. I'll see you next week!”

2:52 a.m. - 2019-12-19

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