Before The Flood: Contempt and Paranoia in the South's Most Liberal City - Part I

thrown out of a coffee shop by a nonbinary goliath and chased through the streets of Asheville by a crazed RFK Jr supporter.

part I

An overweight woman in a pink shirt with white lettering passes by. The text reads, “I bleached my anus for this?”

There are kids here, and it’s mid-afternoon.

I motion to my wife, and she takes in the picture. “This is what we’re up against,” she responds between sips of her neon-colored beer.

Trips to the city invariably go this way, pulled by the magnet of trendy restaurants and fashionable shops, only to be repulsed by the vulgarity of ‘self-expression’ and unabated progressivism. No, I will not be donating to your art commune, where neither work nor art is accomplished.

Luckily, our daughter is two and can’t read, otherwise, she’d be asking why this lady has chemically whitened her most profane of orifices in preparation for an afternoon in Asheville. I don’t have those answers yet.

When do you have to explain to your kid that the cross-dressing blue-haired freakshow in the kids’ section at Barnes & Noble ought to be shunned from polite society instead of receiving the reassuring embrace we’re giving them now? As a parent, you find yourself pining for the segregation of the desperate, attention-seeking nutcases and the rest of us normals.

‘Trannies use the back door’ might read more as an open proposition to the more gender-bending inclined, though. Shop owners beware.

More than just her head and limbs, I want to protect my daughter’s vision. She doesn’t need to see the homeless guy on the corner with his pants pulled down any more than she needs to see the cover for Ty Segall’s Melted. Two-year-olds shouldn’t be confronted with the ugliness of the world yet, which is why we’re here to see something pretty.

In the mountains between Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina, rhododendrons bloom en masse; the bluish-green rounded peaks turn into pockets of pink and purple for two weeks every summer. There are festivals, more like little craft fairs, that celebrate the annual event in Roan Mountain, TN, and Bakersville, NC.

Originally, I tried to convince my wife that we should go to one of the festivals for the day, but fear of being overwhelmed by contact-depression convinced us to return to Asheville for probably the tenth time in a decade.

Contact-depression is the phenomenon one encounters when walking through a shopping mall where a disquieting percentage of stores have been shuttered, or the food court is empty. You can get it driving through a town that has more one-room churches than stoplights. Or, even more dangerously, it can sneak up on you while you watch an adult dine alone at a restaurant.

The websites for the rhododendron festivals of rural Tennessee and North Carolina were enough to ward us away, scrolling through the highlights from years past would make even the most quixotic of optimists consider drawing the curtains and taking a lukewarm bath.

Clogging, crafts, and kettle corn in a town numbering in the hundreds would almost certainly elicit more pity than participation, and we thought we could catch the blooms in a less socially intimate manner, so we booked a house in West Asheville, the hippest, most progressive portion of the city.

As it turns out, metropolitan arrogance also comes in diet suburbia form.

The good people of Appalachia don’t deserve my condescension about the seed oils and bleaches in their funnel cakes. Really, if push were to come to shove, I’d rather throw my lot in these folks than the café Marxists of urban America, but apparently, as my buying and traveling habits would suggest, a decent cup of coffee and a good croissant are worth the political sloganeering that is placed invariably next to the tip jar.

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If my conservative leanings were to be exposed as my wife pours cream into her iced coffee, the scorn aimed in my direction might turn the whole place radioactive and just at that moment, as if some unknown subconscious desire to reveal my disdain for central planning and my admiration of monogamy is triggered. I shift in my seat.

The voice of Ben Shapiro cuts through the air like hot steel through non-dairy, vegan cheesecake. An effort to shut my phone off from the outside of my pocket results in increasing the volume. Betrayed by technology. Words like ‘facts’, ‘free markets’, and ‘sex binary’ careen through the room, pinging off of the carafes and exploding sugar packets. I’m pretty sure the words ‘border wall’ struck a barista in the temple before I could mute my device.

It was too late. I had been made.

I felt the tug of urbane, un-calloused hands on my collar. Gesturing to the laurel wreath on my shirt and my gleaming bald head, the mid-twenties on-again off-again undergrad with a middle part demands, “What are you? Some kind of Proud Boy?”

He smells of tobacco and gender-neutral perfume. “It’s Fred Perry!” I respond.

“Besides, did you know the Proud Boys were started by the founder of Vice Magazine?” I manage to spit out before taking one last gulp of my overpriced beverage.

His backup comes in the form of some androgynous behemoth with painted nails and cutoff jean shorts they must keep in the back of house to grind beans by hand. As my feet come off the ground and I feel myself hurtling towards the door, I turn to look at my wife and daughter who were positively transfixed beside the cream and sugar.

“I’m sorry,” mouths my backstabbing Judas of a wife as she takes a seat at a different table and hands our daughter her snack.

With one final heave, I’m out the door and onto the sidewalk in a heap of disgrace and embarrassment. Expecting tar and feathers, crumpled in a heap with my mouth pressed against my own torso, I ask, “Where’s the best place to see the rhododendrons bloom?”

The thing I could only presume to be named Thaddeus or Persephone or Tyrone grunts in contempt and lumbers back inside, leaving me alone in the sweltering heat of downtown Asheville.

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Later on, marital treason forgiven, we pushed the toddler-laden stroller uphill to an art festival near the courthouse. Navigating a forest of harnessed dogs — collars are becoming a vestige of the time we used to casually torture our canine companions apparently — we made our way through the two rows of booths.

There were cutting boards, paintings of musicians, crystals, and incense. This was neither art nor festival and suddenly, I would’ve given anything to be at the clogging competition in Roan Mountain. I mean, I’ve been to Uncle Dave Macon Day in my hometown; they hold it in a recreation of an early 1800s settlement with a working watermill and the world’s largest cedar bucket. What kind of self-hating yokel am I?

I mean, if one of these effete, bearded, hashpipe-pedaling locals broke out into a tap routine, I’d feel a lot better about stealing the shade of their tents for minutes at a time. Word must have gotten out about the coffee shop fiasco, though, and we were ushered away from the veritable wiccan gathering by dirty looks and tacit threats of curses and various bad juju.

The heat was oppressive, and a red-faced two-year-old called for air conditioning. Walking down Broadway, I spot a cultural oasis on the street corner. A Robert Kennedy campaign table with a volunteer fanning herself with merchandise, desperate for donations and conversation.

RFK Jr was having quite the time getting ballot access in the free state of North Carolina, and this poor soul was out in enemy territory trying to drum up support for his destined-to-fail presidential campaign. “Any questions or concerns you might have about RFK?” she asked down her nose, a litany of rebuttals queuing in her brain.

“No,” I scoffed, answering in a way only the initiated could, “I wouldn’t even care if he did eat that dog.” My wife pulled at my sleeve.

“Right?!?” the zealot snorted.

Her enthusiasm was unsettling, but I persisted with small talk about polling and campaign promises. “But what if it had been a goldendoodle?!” she guffawed, interjecting.

My wife called my name, redirecting the solar flare of zeal in her direction. Wrong move.

“What a beautiful young girl you have,” the would-be moonie grinned, but her face grew gray as if the life was being strangled out of her. Driven mad by the midday sun and the constant barrage of insults from passersby, she croaked, “She’s not vaccinated, is she?”

Was this an agent of our local school board getting the drop on us? Was this woman, this campaigner for bodily autonomy, about to give my child measles or chicken pox just to prove a point? We had no time to answer before she repeated her question, gripping her pamphlets with increasing strength. “She’s not vaccinated. Is she?”

It was then that I had the feeling that animals must get before natural disasters. Like the monkeys fleeing the shore in Thailand before the tsunami hit, I had the urge to evacuate that street corner before the next wave broke. “Run,” I told my wife.

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I’ve never seen her move so quickly, overcome by maternal instinct and adrenaline, she lifted the stroller overhead, leapt over sleeping homeless, pirouetted past oncoming traffic, and in a final moment of inspiration, threw the stroller down on its wheels in front of her, hopped on it’s back like one would a shopping cart, and catapulted herself and our baby downhill at breakneck speed — all in sensible Ralph Lauren flats, mind you. Her parents undoubtedly deprived the world of a generational talent by forcing this female Lewis Hamilton into ballet at the tender age of five.

My family and all that I hold dear disappeared in a cloud of dust in front of me, and the once-friendly volunteer retrained her sights on me. I took my own advice and ran as fast as I could, shouting, “Anthony Fauci killed Jeffrey Epstein!” in an effort to throw her off. Undeterred, of course, she was aware, she was hot on my tracks.

We raced through downtown, flitting in between tourists and locals as I yelled bits of conspiracies over my shoulder, each more incoherent than the last. She batted each one away with the tolerance and contemplation of a practiced heterodox thinker.

“The moon landing was faked! There is no moon!” I yelped.

“Nice try,” she said cooly, “Everyone knows the moon is CIA headquarters.”

I tried again. “Birds aren’t real!”

“Yeah, the feds swapped ‘em out with surveillance robots during COVID!” she replied, besting me.

I was running out of ideas, breathing heavily, and I began to doubt myself. Maybe it was the seventy-something doses of liquid poison pulsing through my veins that were weighing me down. Her footsteps pounded louder and faster than mine. I wasn’t shooting up during my preschool years, was that superfluous Hep C vaccine finally catching up to me? Why did my parents force me to get the Gardasil shot?

“I don’t even have ovaries,” I muttered to myself in mundane discovery as my previously sound worldview shattered around me.

“I didn’t catch that,” she practically whispered in my ear as I searched deep for one last barb, one last gasp to escape.

“The Kennedy family is a multigenerational plot to subvert American Protestantism and establish fealty to the Vatican!”

I burnt the words into my lungs, screaming into the air, too weak to turn around and direct them to my pursuer.

Then, silence.

Some will say it was the latent typhoid fever in her body activated by an elevated heart rate that killed her, but I’m fairly certain it was the deadly cocktail of shock, denial, and intrigue brought on by my claim that did her in. Some are just born with talent.

I saw my two gals a few blocks away, I waved, telling them I’d be just one more minute. Taking my hands off my knees and catching breath, I moseyed on over to the expired Kennedite. There was a crowd forming mostly of mildly concerned faces and hushed tones; the locals figured it was another fallen member of the unhoused community and patted her down for spare needles and dope. I reached for my wallet, grabbed thirty dollars, stuffed it in her blue jeans pocket, and put on her Kennedy 2024 hat. It was the least I could do for the cause.

Down the street in the shade, my stone-cold wife decorated the sidewalk with her aura while our daughter sat in a stupor, utterly shellacked by the superhuman display of athleticism she just witnessed firsthand. With complete nonchalance — and maybe a touch of conceit — as I staggered up the street, she asked, “Wanna get a drink?”