Uncivil X: Aviary Hill, #2

By Chris M. Vise

In this autobiographical novel, eighteen-year-old Chris Rhodes embarks on a personal journey in the grunge era of the early 1990s from his rural Georgia childhood to life in Atlanta. His story is one among the sixty-five million members of Generation X that is unique to him and rooted in the common threads of experience shared across his generation. From facing the storms and aftermath of a disintegrating family to working in country radio, college, facing the challenges of broken promises, learning to forgive an abusive childhood and escaping the walls around and within him.

This is the follow-up to his 2020 debut novel, Dweller On The Boundary. Chris Rhodes, a shy misfit, seeks to find himself in the AIDS and safe-sex eras of gay culture, an increasingly globalized society, culture wars and in the mysteries of the crossed human heart. Uncivil X is at times humorous, often shocking, painfully poignant and a scandalous confessional.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chris M. Vise
• Release date: Apr 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9798224830831

Chris M. Vise

Chris M. Vise was born and raised in New Hope, Georgia. He has lived in Louisville, Kentucky and Atlanta since leaving the hill of his childhood, though it never left his heart. He currently lives in Georgia with his partner. Nature remains a large influence in his life whether it is a beach, a desert or a trail through the deep woods. Chess, photography and gardening are hobbies he enjoys to this day. Chris has appeared on radio stations from New York to Los Angeles during his broadcasting career. Dweller On The Boundary is his debut novel.   Other books by Chris M. Vise include his first novel Dweller On The Boundary, second novel Uncivil X and his third upcoming novel to be published in the summer of 2024.

Book preview

Missing Persons

H ow do you fall out of love, I asked the stars.

Falling from a tree or parachuting from a plane without a parachute was painless compared to making myself not feel love. This undeniable condition, it was a condition like an illness, existed in a state not governed by gravity or reality. In the darkest hearts, the coldest eyes, the thinnest of smiles and in the harshest of words; love defied laws and boundaries to flourish as a dandelion in a concrete sidewalk.

I knew where I caught love and who infected me, but how to stop suffering from it; I did not know the remedy. I thought it might subside like the night at dawn if it was not returned or starved when it was hungry, but love was hellbent on devouring me.

In the late summer of 1991, I was eighteen years old. I asked myself this question and others. I was one of sixty-five million members of Generation X and one of four people that lived on my hill.

I fell as I climbed over the barbed-wire fence. I landed on my back and looked at the mottled sky through the tree canopy that had the phenomenon of crown shyness. The branches of adjoining treetops grew in such a manner that they did not touch each other. I was as shy as those trees.

Nature was beautiful and mysterious. Human nature was no less mysterious, but often not as beautiful - that had not changed and neither had my misunderstanding of it.

My love infected blood streamed down my left arm and dripped onto the leaves and rich black soil of the woods behind my house. I had ripped a sleeve on my favorite thrift store houndstooth shirt from the cuff to the middle of my forearm.

Oh well, I thought, now I would have to wear this shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

I loved this shirt; it hid my skinny frame and the memory sewn to it, like the fake tortoise shell buttons. The last guy I dated a year ago said that if a shirt could be me that this was the one.

I can't remember you any other way, he had said.

He took a photo and the film ran out soon after between us. I never saw the end of anything before it happened. I witnessed endings, lived them, but I was no prophet.

The pain in my arm was clear and strong, a signal tuned in to the precise dot with the volume at ten. The gash was a near miss from slicing my wrist open. If it had, New Hope had finally bagged me. It waited until I did something that I had done since I was five and caught me not looking. Nothing obvious; it had to be sly and without witnesses. New Hope was that kind of sneaky place.

I did not, seldom did I, know what my destination was, but I had to walk through my thoughts like sheets of paper scattered across the floor of my bedroom to air them out. The miles of woods behind my house I knew as well as the ones in my mind and heart and that was a problem. I was certain the answer to my question was in there, but I could not find it.

There were two missing people and one lost person.

One person went missing seven years ago in 1984; the other went missing in 1983; and I was lost in pieces that went back to the late 1970s. Time nibbled away and sometimes had taken chunks of me at random intervals until what remained in 1991 was the fragments named Chris Rhodes.

It was Oliver Perdu who went missing in 1984. He was not missing from the entire world, only from me. His face was not on posters or milk cartons taken from a faded family photo. Someone, maybe dozens of people, knew where he was, but what mattered to me was that I did not know.

He was someone on the end of a broken promise I made as an eleven-year-old boy. He resided in my heart, my mind and as a weight on my shoulders. I had to find him. My betrayal required him to be better than I was at eleven and grant me forgiveness. He could hate me or he could love me as he once did. I had three words for him: I am sorry.

Where did you find the missing? How did you take a person from missing to found? Oliver was not misplaced like a pair of shoes by a careless young boy and punished for it. He was not in the mall's lost and found waiting for me to retrieve him. He was gone.

Look to the sky for protection and answers was what I was instructed to do as a young boy. Not to a god or for an angel, I was told to look there by a boy that wanted to give me hope that he would come back one day. We shared promises and fingers crossed our hearts. He went missing in 1983 for seven years. That boy, Robin, was now a man three years older than me. Last year, he landed at my feet. He did not save me or protect me; maybe he loved me, but he left again. He was not my savior. I had to save myself.

I loved Robin, for all the harm and misery it caused me and I had to fall out of love with him. I loved him in the worst way and that love was the worst thing for me.

I closed my eyes. A drop of liquid splashed on my cheek. Either it began to rain or a bird peed on me. I rubbed it away and something else hit me. It was an idea.

I smeared the blood from my Swatch, it ticked and advanced as I tried to catch up. I applied dried leaves to the cut and stood. One foot went forward and the other followed. One day, I would escape and that exit would be on my terms when my signature dried on a treaty with the past.

Where have you been, Chris, my mother asked when I came into the kitchen.

Not trying to kill myself, I said.

Huh?

You didn't notice, I guess.

I held up my arm with the ripped shirt sleeve and the dried blood.

What on earth? Is that from a snake?

I explained what happened.

Why didn't you come back sooner?

It didn't look that bad to me. I put leaves on it. I didn't need an ambulance or stitches.

I swear, sometimes you're as clumsy as I am. Get that cleaned up, change clothes and dinner will be ready in a few minutes.

I looked at the kitchen table. Of the four possible place settings, three had plates and utensils. My older brother, Noah, was not eating with us. He rarely did anymore, at twenty-three he had places to be and women to chase. My father, Derry, ate with us four days a week. My father, at forty-three, had places to be too; the bars and running off to where he was born in Decatur County, Tennessee most every weekend, doing who knew what. My mother was there for dinner every night, but she, also forty-three, had more places to be than she had before. I had been the constant place at the table since 1973 and had no place to be.

The thermostat was set at sixty-eight degrees, though it felt colder, and the speed in my house was set on cruise control at fifty-five. We knew our roles and played them and if we did not, none of the others noticed or cared. The laundry was washed, dried, folded and sorted, the grass mowed, the house cleaned and the mail was collected most every day it came. The material needs were met and the emotional ones were delinquent. A family by legal definition lived in my house atop a pine-covered hill that I called Aviary Hill in New Hope, Georgia. It was not all of my family; my younger half-sister, Asta, who was a secret for a few years, lived in another part of Paulding County. Most of the secrets lived on Aviary Hill. Each of us had them, big ones, bad ones and I knew most of them and carried them around locked inside my head or in my journals with my tragic secrets.

After dinner, I loaded the dishwasher and my parents went to the living room. My mother read Body of Evidence and my father watched America's Funniest Home Videos. The television was too loud and it echoed through the bi-level room. I was likely the only person to notice.

I passed through on my way to my end of the house with an armload of telephone books. I looked at my parents and they did not see me.

There were three different worlds in my house and four different realities. The house was renovated in the last year and though I had spent my entire life in this house, I did not feel as though I had grown up in it.

My end of the house occupied parts of the first and second floor, which you entered through a French door from the first level of the downstairs living room. I had a private staircase and it was similar to a loft in that it was open between the floors as you entered. I used the first floor as storage for old furniture and books. At the top of the stairs was my bedroom, with floor-to-ceiling windows looking south. The rest of my part of the second floor was a hallway, a bathroom, a room I used as a computer room and access to a storage space in the attic.

My brother occupied the other half of the second floor with his own living room, bedroom, kitchenette and bathroom. He came and went from an exterior staircase on the northern end of the house. There was an adjoining door between our two halves, but it was always locked.

My end of the house was designed in all wood from the floor to the ceiling. The walls were thick blonde pine paneling trimmed in red cedar. The ceilings were red cedar and large red cedar beams served as columns and railings between the two levels.  There was so much wood that no matter what cologne I wore, I smelled like wood. I probably tasted like it too.

I sat on my bed against the wall with the pile of books. I could see downstairs and the French door. I looked at the books and said, Wish me luck. In my lap was the local phone book, The Greater Atlanta residential book and I brought the Yellowpages too if my fingers needed more exercise.

When looking for something or in this case, someone, it was better that I began my search near rather than far. I opened the Dallas phone book and flipped to the letter P. There was not a single entry for Perdu. It did not mean Oliver did not live nearby, but maybe he did not have a phone line of his own as a teenager. My family was not in the phone book either; we paid for it to be unlisted after the troubles in the 1980s.

The Greater Atlanta book was somewhat more hopeful. There were people listed that shared his surname. I knew the names of his parents and his sibling and none of those names were listed. I was not calling a stranger in Dunwoody to ask if they knew Oliver. I was too shy for that.

I bit my bottom lip. I had little feeling in it from nerve damage and my chin was completely numb after my jaw surgery earlier in the year. The feelings that I wanted to return did not, like people I missed.

I put the books on the floor and went to sleep.

I'll be right back, Oliver said, climbing down the ladder of my tree house.

Where are you going?

To the ground.

He hopped from the last rung and disappeared from view. I climbed down after him and he stood next to the grave of my dog that was run over in front of me when I was seven.

That's King, he said, pointing to the rocks I had used to encircle the grave with the help of Robin.

How did you know that? You didn't live here then.

He had one blue eye and one brown eye.

Oliver, I've never told you anything about King. Not his name, the story or anything about him.

He loved you and you loved him. You cried when he was smashed. His voice was as though he were reading the ingredients from a carton of ice cream.

I loved him very much. He was my...

First dog, Oliver said. He turned to look at me and pointed. You have blue eyes and I have brown eyes. We could be like King if we traded one of our eyes.

Gross, stop it. I don't like this.

He smiled and asked, Did you cry when I was smashed in the face? I protected you.

I screamed.

I woke up in a sweat and turned on a light. My bandage was off my left arm and I bled.

In the morning, I brushed my teeth. The foam fell out of my mouth into the sink. My mouth would never work the same again. The idea of near then far repeated in my head. I tried one list of names and then thought of another list.

A mile from my house was the New Hope cemetery. Some cemeteries were beautiful, I had been in plenty, but this one was practical and unremarkable. It was a parking lot for the dead squeezed between a small trailer park, ringed by the ever-present pine that was as pretty or interesting as a toothpick, a road that carried garbage trucks and my former elementary school. It did not even occupy a beautiful hill; instead, it was on a lazy slope like a bump in a messed-up rug. It was a humble place, like the community around it. The community was a pass-through to some better place, except for the dead stowed forever in the red clay ground.

I was here to not find a friend or so I hoped in this field of names. I did not want to apologize to a grave. If it took all day, I was to walk this cemetery row by row, reading the names, until I knew that Oliver was not buried a mile from my house. Under a green umbrella with a bent spoke, I began my search in the light rain.

I began at the bottom of the slope and worked my way through the bouquets of artificial roses and the etched marble and granite headstones.

Midway through, I met a group of men in thick gloves with strong arms and chests. They made quick work of gouging out a scar in the ground. They were out of sync as their shovels bit into the earth at irregular intervals. Their sound was similar to that of a wet sock slapped against a concrete wall over and over.

I moved by and realized, cemeteries were not for the dead, but of the dead. It was for the living that cemeteries were intended, for grieving hearts and remembering promises.

By the end of the cemetery, it was good to see the graves of the soldiers buried from the American Civil War battle of New Hope. Oliver was not buried here. I assumed he was still alive.

I returned home in the late afternoon. My brother Noah was loading his fishing rods and tackle boxes into his boat as I closed my car door.

Hey Chris, he shouted.

Yeah.

You want to go fishing?

I looked at him like he spoke an unknown language.

When?

Now.

Okay, sure. Let me change clothes and eat a sandwich. Give me about fifteen minutes.

The last time my brother invited me to do anything with him was over two years ago. I was enlisted to go to Cumberland Mall to go last-minute Christmas shopping for his girlfriend.

Next to him in his truck, we headed north on Highway 92 and I asked, Why did you want me to come?

I have a fishing tournament next weekend and I wanted to do some pre-fishing to see what they were biting and where.

You do that all the time without me.

He looked in his rear-view mirror and rubbed his leg.

I also had the boat motor worked on and I don't trust it. In case the motor died in the middle of the lake, I wanted someone to help me paddle back to the boat ramp.

I covered my face and laughed.

Now you tell me. Noah Rhodes, you'll never change.

The boat slipped into the green and brown water at a boat ramp at Lake Allatoona. The remnants of a Styrofoam cooler floated in small bits against the bank and fishing line hung from a tree. The sun was to set in an hour. I was going to be nervous. I smelled the scent of fish, heard the hum of distant boats and I was seven again. I came to the lake many times over the years to sit and watch the water from the shore. I had not been back on the water of Allatoona in eleven years when we stopped camping and boating as a family. The summers at the lake were some of my fondest memories, even though the water scared me at night.

In these waters, our family was lost in 1980. I thought the secret to our demise was out here between the buoys, channel markers and ski jumps. Whatever happened to bring about the destruction in the nineteen eighties culminated here. It was difficult for me to reconcile as some of my best memories of our family were set here on the muddy shores and between the cresting waves. We hooked into something that was bigger and stronger than us and it pulled us under.

Noah pulled into a cove and trolled the banks. He cast, reeled and cast again, hoping to hook into the big one that he had chased his entire life. I cast out my rubber worm and imitated him, fishing only interested me in spells, like cravings for lime sherbet. I watched the water and listened to it slap and suck at the bottom of the boat; that sound was the best narcotic.

He reeled in one bass after another and I caught sticks on the bottom until I caught a catfish. It fought harder than I thought it could for its size. My one catch was enough and I stopped. I watched Noah fish into the early morning over the grave of our family.

We went home to our glued-back-together family. Our parents were asleep and sleepwalked into their early forties. The house rested as calmly as the lake at sunrise. Our family held onto the rope in the water. There was a tug on the end and clouds of disturbed mud billowed to the surface.

The Killing Frost

Iworked the afternoons at a country radio station in Cartersville, Georgia. I was a disc jockey, producer on a gospel show, part-time news anchor and I voiced commercials for car lots, pizza joints and hair salons. I sometimes sold air time to clients as a way to learn as much as I could about radio broadcasting. My job was only glamorous to me. I was proud of my FCC operator's license posted on the wall of the studio next to the other staff.

This was my dream since I was a little boy in my bedroom spinning my mother's Elvis records on a plastic record player. I was diverted for a year from that dream when, in the fourth grade, I wanted to be an attorney, but I came to my senses the following year. I wanted to be a writer too, but that would only happen if I allowed myself to be honest about life and I was not ready.

Working in country radio was not my dream, there was a new format called alternative that was for, by and of Generation X. Alternative radio was my dream job. I needed seasoning and had to pay my dues.

The station I worked for was owned by a brother and sister in their early sixties. Their names were Davis Lee and Clara; they were the last two members of a local wealthy family that made their fortune in cotton a century before. Their old money went into their hobby radio station that they inherited from their father. Neither had married nor had children and they lived in the family mansion on the other side of town with lawn jockeys at the end of the driveway.

The morning disc jockey was a man named Chick. He was a disabled Vietnam combat veteran with a prosthetic leg that he liked to remove in the studio and set on the console. He wore his dog tags and orange tinted sunglasses day and night. I assumed the glasses were for the times he spent worshiping at the altar of his idol, Jim Morrison.  He had worked for the Voice of America.  He came home to work at medium market rock stations around the South, but not in a major market like Atlanta. He never made it to the big leagues of the business, but to listen to him tell his stories in his gruff Army sergeant voice, he was Mr. Big Time. The early frost of alcoholism and pills iced his career. If he had a smack addiction, he would have been more with the times.

Chick was quick to pull rank on me since this was my first job in my life. He assumed I knew nothing about radio from a technical or on-air performance perspective. He said I was a newbie in shitty diapers with a pacifier in my mouth. Chick did not scare me; he was a bully with a barking cough, serious addictions and a negative attitude.

I did not get into radio on a whim, as a hobby or thinking it would be like the television show WKRP in Cincinnati. I saw it as a calling and I had a plan.

It was my first job, but I had graduated from broadcasting school and was trained on far more advanced equipment than any of the gear at this station. I had walked the halls of the big Atlanta stations, had professional connections and they had given me coaching and career advice. I had declined a job at Z-93, the classic rock station in Atlanta. The job was in the promotions department and was a foot in the door at the very bottom. I did not get into radio to hand out t-shirts and bumper stickers at car lots and music festivals or to play music from my parents' generation which I was anesthetized. At least at a country station, all of the music was new to me, even the classic stuff. My job was an education in a genre I knew nothing about.

Hey Chrissie, Chick said as I entered the studio. Will you shelve these records for me?

I shelved the albums for him in the library. Chick called me Chrissie, but I never replied to it. I starved it of oxygen and knew it would pass or that he would drop dead from an overdose sooner or later. Chick and I spoke little as his air shift ended and mine began.

"Good afternoon. I'm Chris Rhodes and you're listening to Dixie Country. That was David Allan Coe's You Never Even Called Me By My Name, I spoke into the microphone. We play your country favorites and I'll admit that when I play this next song, I like to sit and appreciate the masterful storytelling. It's the Grammy winner for best country song from 1990, Kathy Mattea's Where've You Been on Dixie Country."

My shyness and reluctance to let others know me was in opposition to my career. There was a magic that happened with me as soon as I was behind a microphone and shared my love for music. I was not in broadcasting for my ego, like most people that wanted to be in the public eye. I was in this business because I loved music and talking about it. Music was personal for each listener; it was ingrained in lives and associated with their best and worst moments. The most valuable lesson I learned in broadcasting was when I was told to think of your audience as one person and not thousands of people. Radio was an intimate audience of one.

Sometimes I sent messages in the music I chose to play.

The Sunday midnight crickets of late September sang through my open upstairs window. I consoled myself with the realization that the crickets would not sing for much longer. Summer did not last forever in the South, though some years it was stubborn deep into October. The killing frosts could not silence them soon enough.

I was restless and the sound of crickets in the late night hours had a peculiar effect on me for years. I tried to dismiss the feeling and the associated memories. I was left with this strange reaction as an unwanted gift from Robin. I was in bed with a book in my lap and in my head, I was in my tree house, lying next to him. The chirping of the crickets was the soundtrack to our late-night fumblings. Many summer nights I tried to laugh it off, but the chirping made me horny. If I told another person about this, I knew they would say it was the craziest reaction to crickets they ever heard, not that I went around telling people the secret of Robin and me as young boys. I had crossed my heart on that, but I did not foresee that I had promised to be left with bizarre wounds that were sometimes open sores.

I had sworn off sex since my last encounter in high school. The killing frost of jaw surgery in the spring left me with permanent nerve damage in my bottom lip and chin. It made shaving my face with a blade precarious and sometimes bloody. I had no idea how the numbness might change sex for me.

I turned on the television and tapped in the channel for MTV. The show 120 Minutes was on; it played music on the cutting edge and many of the bands and artists I did not know. I sought something new. I was bored with the hair bands of my high school years that made bloated music videos that cost millions. Their heads were so far up their own asses that they choked on their own caviar covered egos.

Videos and commercials for long distance calling cards played and I tried to focus on my book. I glanced up when I heard the host say that it was a world premiere video and blue globes danced around the screen.

A Converse sneaker tapped on a set of gym bleachers to a guitar. The shot moved, cheerleaders with pompoms came into view and then drums and guitars punched through.

It was a band called Nirvana and the song was Smells Like Teen Spirit.

I closed my book and watched the video of this new band that had three members. The lead singer had blonde hair hanging over his face and he could be cute with a good scrubbing in the shower. He played left-handed and I liked that; there was always a sense of kinship with a fellow lefty.

The song alternated between loud and quiet and it was not about love. I had no idea what it was about, but I was lulled into a trance. I liked what I heard and felt as though I was not supposed to like it, but love it. This was very different. It was like an anthem for the misfits of society.

A group of guys my age slam danced. There was a dancing janitor and cheerleaders that had the anarchy symbol on their chests.

I kept watching, I had no choice. This music seemed to be mocking all of the petrified rock music that came before it. There was sonic chaos, humor, a smashed guitar and then it ended.

I reached for my journal and wrote down the name of the band, the album and the song. I was in love with whatever that was. It was love at first sound and sight. I had found something and something had found me.

The next day I ripped off the cellophane from the CD, Nevermind outside of Turtle's Records in Marietta. I had the urge to drive without a destination, no desire to go home and to listen to every track. The landscapes around me were so familiar, like the music I grew up on, that I no longer saw them as anything but blurry impressionist paintings. I lived in soft, gauzy hues of color and this music was like jumping headfirst off a diving board into a Kandinsky. The loud and quiet were like transitioning from a raging migraine to swimming in the amniotic fluid of the womb. It was simultaneously exciting and hypnotic. There was malaise, sarcasm and humor in the lyrics. The experience was custom-made to fit me.

This was unknown territory.

For a generation that had nothing to rebel against except our own angst over