Category Archives: Big Stone Gap

Another Cuppa Pee, Luv?

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When Jack and I first visited my NYC editor Nichole and agent Pamela in 2012, we landed as two country mice, tails tucked and whiskers quivering, eyes big with wonder. This year, we rolled into Penn Station, pulled out the iPhone, and started texting. Pamela picked us up, hailed a cab, and off we drove to our cheery Inwood hideaway for a cozy cafe dinner and a catch-up.

The next day we met our old shopsitter Andrew Whalen for a fun day hiking Central Park and shopping for overpriced duvet covers in trendy Soho. Yeah, we know how to live large in the Big Apple; we bought housewares.

Back to the flat for a post-dinner glass of wine and catch-up with David and Nichole, whose place we were crashing. We cracked open a bottle of red and Jack’s ubiquitous single malt as Nichole launched into a story….

Up until recently, David (an opera singer by trade) was the president of the apartment building coop, housing some 30 families of various eccentricities. There’s Mrs. M downstairs; “she’s 140.” There’s the dour Bulgarians. And there’s the lady who sublet her second bedroom to a succession of roommates, all of whom were “okay guys, because they’re friends of my boyfriend.”

That ringing endorsement kept the truth from surfacing at first, when a guy on the fourth floor complained to David that the pile of old wood left after a renovation was attracting neighborhood dogs. The urine smell forced him to leave his windows closed.

David asked the super to move the stuff, but a week later the smell was back. And the tenant smelling it said, “Weird. I hear ‘splat’ and then the odor wafts up.”

As David and the pee-smelling man sat discussing the problem, a Dixie cup went flying past the window–followed by a splat and a smell of urine. “CHOCKS AWAY!”

David went to the super and explained what he’d seen. He had a hard time explaining it, because he was still having a hard time believing he’d seen it. “No, seriously with my own eyes, a Dixie cup and it was pee, I’m telling you, it was pee, from the fifth or sixth floor!”

One can only imagine the poor super’s response: “You takin’ the piss?”

Meanwhile, Nichole –who had been working some pretty long hours that month–put two and two together to reach five. She deduced that the odd man in 6C was holding his wife’s parents hostage in the smaller bedroom. “We never see them, and Mia’s looking so pale and wan these days. That must be it!!” She began planning an intervention that may or may not have involved Kevlar.

Meanwhile II, the building super–who’d really had it with the flying pee stories, but was just flat alarmed by the request for a battering ram–went and sat in a tree across from the apartment in question with a pair of night vision goggles and a black light. And waited.

When the pee flew, it came not from the flat with the weird man Nichole “just knew” was holding his in-laws hostage, but from the one with the string of successive roommates. When confronted, Subrenter denied everything, but the super hadn’t spent the last five hours in a tree to put up with more crap. Subby got voted out by the building’s coop members.

As we collapsed with mirth around the coffee table, Nichole admitted to feeling guilt over her preparations to storm the sixth floor. Would the family have been sitting, drinking tea, when the intervention team barged in? “Oh, hello there. Cuppa, anyone?”

Amid the general hilarity, Nichole, choking on a giggle, added, “I know people in other places think we have these big grand lives, but this is what it comes down to: little, and busy, and problems to solve!”

Big, little, and in-between, we had a grand night discussing the best place to buy a cheap duvet cover and the fastest way to evict a guy who flings pee out the window in Dixie cups. And it just goes to show, the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence. Of course it is; the fool in 6F has been fertilizing it.

Bollards of Big Stone

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Note: Jack and Wendy are headed to NYC today, so the blog may be a little off timing the next couple of days as the two country mice adjust. Meanwhile, here’s the fun doings in Big Stone Gap!

The movie being filmed in town right now is causing all sorts of reactions among the locals–mostly enthusiastic FB posts showing them hugging long-suffering Hollywood A-listers. (A big shout of thanks to Ms. Elfman for helping us adopt out 3 PAWS cats within a week by photo-cuddling them.)max and jenna

The movie buzz is good for the town – economically and intellectually. Someone asked me the other day if the movie had made locals proud, and before I could open my mouth a bookstore customer said, “We’ve always been proud of our town. We know who we are. Now we’re proud that other people are hearing about us.”

Jack and I are happy to watch the hoopla and enjoy the buzz, but it got side-splitting silly over the weekend. The movie company set up on Wood Ave (the main street through town) on Friday night. Trust us; we know from experience how hard it is to get a 15-minute parade permit for closing that street, let alone 2 whole days, so we watched with enthusiasm. 

Saturday morning bright and early some police arrived and set up cones across the road that comes off Wood toward our shop. The only one way left to thread through town went right past our bookstore, so we got a front row seat for the high jinks. (And we locked up our indoor/outdoor cats for the day, plying them with kitty candy whenever they yowled to go outside. I think they gained 10 pounds on Saturday alone.)

The  closed block-long section of Fourth Avenue holds the liquor store and post office, so when they put up the bollards (those orange cones) they blocked in some people who’d made an early start to acquisitions (of post office box mail, of course). These folk came out, glanced at the cones, and drove around them–over curbs, through a parking lot, no matter. They waved at the cops and the cops waved back.

But then people watching them drive out started using the same technique to drive in; the cops had gone by now, leaving one little “ROAD CLOSED” sign to do the dirty work. Someone knocked it down, going around it.

The cops came back about an hour later, and put up more roadblock signs, stretched across where the ineffectual bollards had been. That lasted about ten minutes.

The cops returned. They left one of their own, a young woman (she might have been twenty) who was promptly ignored by those driving around her–waving–to reach the liquor store and post office. We have often sat out on our front veranda watching locals breaking every traffic law possible as they turn at that intersection right smack in front of our bookstore, but Saturday and Sunday brought a whole new level. That poor young officer spent the next two hours shouting with increasing frustration and decreasing effect at motorists who just didn’t see why they should care that she was there. We quickly broke them down into three categories:

1) “We wanna see the stars” These were innocent groups of thrill seekers trying to see the action. Road block? Don’t think so.

2) Oblivious folk who failed to see anything different; “Hmm, who put that annoying sign there?” Both drivers and walkers fell into this category, and it was hysterical to watch them head blithely for the center of action, one block away, and be tackled by people leaping in front of them just short of the post office steps. Apparently the cameras were rolling right at the corner of the post office, and I don’t know how many shots were ruined that day by people who just didn’t notice anything unusual.

3) Our personal favorites, the drivers who considered it their God-given right to park outside the post office or ABC store, just as they always did, and complete their weekend errands. “Movie? Stuff and nonsense. Let me by, sonny.” We loved watching these people literally walk past police and film crew with outstretched arms. In one case an older woman swatted at a young man in a ball cap; we could almost hear the conversation “I don’t know you, young man, but get out of my way or I’ll call the police!” (who were about four feet away, also trying to stop her).

bollards of big stoneThe crew filmed two days, and on day two, perhaps realizing less was more, they reduced the street closure to just the Wood Avenue junction, leaving unfettered access to the ABC (which opens at 1 pm on Sundays) and limited access to the post office lobby with its rows of PO boxes.

Some people fear that this movie will encourage people to make fun of “hicks and hillbillies,” and display us, the residents of Big Stone Gap, as the same. But I think the residents of Southwest Virginia have been, are, and always will be resilient people who ignore bollards and stereotypes as we go about our business. We know who we are, and when the hoopla is over, that’s who we’ll still be.