by Paul Theroux
Eleven hours of driving got me to Virginia, and when I awoke the next day and checked my map, I decided to take a different road and head to Georgia, where I had someone to meet in Elberton.
Almost without noticing, I was out of the tunnel and could breathe again, and the back roads of the South had the summer tang and licorice fragrance of softened, sun-heated tar.
“They Took Mah Teeth”
Some drivers were looking for a pit stop or lunch at the diner on the side road near Henderson, North Carolina, and one of them was Rob Birmingham, whom I sat with for a while. He was my age, and our lives had been parallel, black and white, his one of struggle, service, and ill health, mine one of indoor scribbling and disappearances.
“I was in the military. I sure been through it. I could tell you stories.”
I was reminded that the South is full of army vets from small towns and humble homes, the military their escape, sometimes their salvation, often their burden, and now and then their punishment.
Rob Birmingham was a heavyset man with an earnest and kindly face, wearing a Washington Redskins cap and thick-lensed glasses. He walked with difficulty, in an odd toppling way, and had trouble with stairs. He was calm in repose—listening—his manner subdued, but when he spoke he became agitated, as though the act of speaking excited him and made him remember. He said he had been wronged.
“Please tell me what happened,” I said.
“I was in the 82nd Airborne in Vietnam, 1968 and ’69, ask anyone, the worst time. We lost sixty-five percent of our soldiers there. I was in an airmobile unit.” He put his hands over his face and sighed, and resumed. “First there was the Agent Orange. We used to drink bomb crater water. We put pills in it to make it drinkable. But the pills were no good. It wasn’t fit for a cow.”
“It made you sick?”
“As a dog,” he said. “I had problems from the moment I was discharged. Later on I went up to Walter Reed, for treatment and everything—for my PTSD and my sickness from Agent Orange. Sometimes it would take the nurse five or six hours to come and change you. They’d take your medication and sell it back to you. Also your shoes and socks—they’d take ’em and sell ’em back to you.”
“What was the point of that?”
“It was a numbers game,” he said with a grim smile, but I had no idea what that meant.
“It sounds like punishment.”
“And mah teeth. They took mah teeth, so’s I couldn’t eat. I haven’t the faintest idea why they did it, but it always caused a fight, and then I was in lockdown. They did a lot of things just to irritate you.”
“You mentioned Agent Orange.”
“Agent Orange affected my hip, my shoulder. It affected my kids too. My son Maurice had to go to Tucson, Arizona, to live. And my grandkids are affected too—I haven’t the faintest idea why. I had my hip done, and back surgery, and both my knees done because of it.”
He got up from the bench and sighed.
“They used us as guinea pigs and let us die.”
We sat in silence for a while, the word dah still in the air, swelling, like a lengthening shadow. As though to break the mood, he asked me where I was going. I told him Georgia.
“You want to be particular careful,” he said.
I said it was a pleasure driving the back roads of the Deep South. And I added that he’d been through a great deal, that he was a hero for having endured it. We swapped cell phone numbers.
Four hours later—I was entering South Carolina—my cell phone rang.
“It’s Rob. You all right, man? You still on the road? You call me if you need anything.”
Last Days
Another indication that I was in the South was the chorus of radio preachers across the whole dial, from frequency to frequency, shouting sermons of denunciation that proved we were in the Last Days.
“As Paul told Timothy—Second Timothy,” they said, one after another. “‘But know this, that in the Last Days grievous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, haughty, railers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, implacable, slanderers, without self-control, fierce, not lovers of good, traitors, headstrong, puffed up, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding a form of godliness but having denied the power therefore. From these also turn away. For of these are they that creep into houses, and take captive silly women laden with sins, led away by divers lusts, ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth . . .’”
I went on listening, so I wouldn’t miss the preacher asking for money, for good works, for outreach, and to keep the program on the air.
Some music played, and I thought: This doom and gloom is the way of the world, a description as applicable today as in the time it was written, in the first century, probably not by Paul but by a close disciple—the eternal truths of human weakness, greed, insincerity, and self-deception true in any age.
Last Days? Don’t they know? These traits are the traits of all days, every day, everywhere.
Massoud: “I Make Curbstones”
In northeast Georgia, not far from the state line of South Carolina, I found the quarry town of Elberton and an unlikely Southerner named Massoud Besharat, who had arrived in Elberton from Tehran via Austria, France, and England. He had been recommended to me as an outsider who had succeeded in the South, where outsiders could claim so few successes.
“What do you do?” I asked.
He said, “I make curbstones.” Then he laughed, but it wasn’t a joke.
Mounted on the kitchen wall of Massoud’s large house, on a side street in the small town, was a Yugoslavian-made AK-47 with a high-capacity curved magazine jammed into it. I remarked on this, saying I could not remember ever seeing a fully automatic assault rifle on display in a cozy kitchen, and what about the magazine, was it loaded?
“Of course is loaded! What use if not loaded?”
He lifted it from the wall and fiddled with the charging mechanism and laughed again, a mirthless mocking Iranian laugh, whinnying in his nose. A foreigner might learn to speak perfect English, but a foreigner laughs in his own native way, often an ancient and menacing noise.
Massoud owned several expensive motorcycles, including a Harley-Davidson Duo-Glide, which he rode throughout Georgia wearing a chic Louis Vuitton helmet. On the sloping man-made cliff of ornamental stones behind his house he had installed a waterfall that you could switch on and off. When it was on, and tumbling and gushing, I could barely hear what Massoud was saying, though this was not a hardship for me.
He put me in his attic spare room, and I got to know him over the next three days. That he was wealthy, boastful, hard-bargaining, nihilistic, art-loving, overbearing, stylish, scheming, wily, generous, calculating, and suspicious he freely admitted, putting these qualities down to his Iranian charm and upbringing. But he was quick to add, “I hate Iran. I hate Iranians. I ran away. I ran to London and I was very happy there working in a fish-and-chips shop.”
He claimed to be a dropout, but somehow he had acquired a fortune, a mastery of stonecutting and the science of diamond saws, a connoisseurship of modern American and nineteenth-century French painting, a taste for interior decoration, a skill at selling high-end real estate, and a genuine though exhausting bonhomie. He seemed to me another example of an alien—like the inevitable Mr. Patel—spotting an opportunity in the South and seizing it. But Massoud was more colorful than most, and more enterprising.
Although he was swarthy and hawk-nosed and conspicuously exotic, and loud with opinions, he had many friends and well-wishers in this rural Deep South town of five thousand people. Far from being shunned or badgered, he’d been welcomed, probably because he had an egomaniacal confidence, a sense of humor, and lots of money, and undoubtedly because he was a part of Elberton’s success in employing hundreds of local people. He also owned a busy art gallery in Atlanta, about one hundred miles away. Showing me a brochure that pictured the sculptures of
the shapely women exhibited in his gallery, he said, “My ex-wives and girlfriends!”
I complimented him on the paintings in his house.
“These are nothing. You must visit me in Paris,” he said. “I am finishing a hotel in Barbizon. There is nothing like it in all of France. Just twelve suites, luxury ones, and each suite is filled with paintings of the Barbizon School. You know Barbizon?” Then he began to yell. “Beautiful painters! Millet! Corot! Félix Ziem! My hotel will be like a musée—is already like a musée! I have exhibitions now in the salon!”
He happened to be holding a vintage German Luger as he was talking to me. He said, “Guns. I love guns,” and pressed the pistol to his face, like a child caressing his cheek with a binkie. Adding to the effect were Massoud’s eyeglasses, which were orange-rimmed. He claimed to own fifty pairs of glasses—different colors, but all of them the same goggle shape.
THE TOWN OF Elberton, known mainly for its quarries, sits on a three-mile-thick, thirty-mile-long, solid subterranean bed of blue granite. The first quarry was dug in 1882, and quarrying started in earnest in 1889, flourishing when an Italian stonecutter named Peter Bertoni came to Elberton, bought a quarry, and began cutting and sculpting granite monuments. Elberton claims to monopolize the granite gravestone business in the United States, and it also fashions cobblestones and paving blocks and countertops and obelisks and tall pillars. There were now forty quarries in and around the town and more than two hundred stone companies. Massoud owned Blue Sky, one of the biggest quarries in the area, and was sawing the foundation and underparts of Elberton into chunks, dividing those chunks into curbstones, and shipping them all over the country.
Though he tended to clown and to tease, he was an ingenious man with a nose for profit, alert for ways to augment and improve his businesses. He had hundreds of employees, black and white and Mexican migrants too, laboring in his quarries. The technique of stonecutting was slow and tedious, accomplished with complex and specialized machinery, large steel cranes, flywheel contraptions that drew a continuous diamond-wire loop through the granite wall of the quarry, cooling the wire with a jet of water, and freeing twenty-foot-high blocks, a whole Stonehenge of slabs rolling out every day.
“Can you imagine how much diamond wire we use for this?” Massoud said. “And it’s expensive. We used to buy it from China.”
“You don’t buy it anymore?”
He laughed, giggly mirth, which, with the red-rimmed glasses he had on today, made him seem silly. But he was no fool.
“I make the diamond wire! I have factory in Elberton! I sell diamond wire! I make business.”
Later he showed me Imex, his factory on a back street, which was half assembly line and half high-tech laboratory, where thirty or so employees were electroplating diamond chips or beads to a strong but flexible quarter-inch wire. This work of making coils of diamond wire was slow, and there were many fiddly stages in the process, requiring technical skill, expensive machinery, and great patience from the fabricators, given the monotony and exactitude at each stage. In another factory nearby, a team of men and women made rotary saws with diamond teeth—ten feet in diameter—giant discs used for cutting the granite.
“This is eco-friendly. I’m not like the other guys—they use jet-piercing method, flames that heat the rock and make channels. I cut it with diamond wire. Less waste, no fire.”
This small town in rural Georgia was noted for its quarries but not for its technical schools or training colleges or manufacturing. So, seeing the many workers in white smocks and goggles, bent over the workbenches, among the fat jars of sparkly diamond chips, and others annealing the diamonds in white-hot ovens, I asked, “Where did these people learn how to do this?”
“Me—I teach!” Massoud said. “And Bijan.”
Bijan Amini was his cousin, also a refugee from Iran, and an engineer and chemist, the supervisor of both the quarry work and the production of diamond wire.
“Best for slabbing large surfaces,” Bijan said. “Extracting big blocks of stone. Faster. No waste.”
“He is genius!” Massoud said. “Now I must go. I have a French lesson tonight. I have business in France. I want to speak this language. But how can I help you? What do you want to see? My butler—you can meet him. He is a redneck! He loves guns! What do you want to do?”
I said I wanted to talk to some of his employees at the quarry, who looked so tiny and well organized in the deep, squared holes in the earth, laboring like Egyptians, as though cutting vast blocks for pyramids, swinging them on tripods and pulleys.
Jesse: “Everyone Knows That Tingly Feeling Goes Away”
In the steamy rain and mass of puddles, the granite quarry looked like botched surgery on a grand scale, the green earth and the woods laid open and the stone innards exposed and carved up and hoisted. Ten different pits had been dug across eighty acres—systematically, the machines whirring, the diamond wire gnawing, but it was all oddly brutal, this removal of solid stone, making a deep, square-sided hole where the surface had once been a curvaceous set of hills. It sounds fanciful to say that the quarrymen were doing violence to the earth, but that was how it seemed to me—like plunder, like violation, disemboweling Elberton. Yet I could not deny the ingenuity of it, the scrambling men, the howling machines, the enormous blocks sawed out of solid rock, the open pits in the ground with smooth rock walls.
At the entrance to the quarry were open-sided, high-roofed sheds where granite slabs were sized and cut with rotary saws into curbstones, and others hacked apart by massive, wide-bladed guillotines. None of this was simple: each slab weighed ten tons and had to be maneuvered, chained to a block and tackle. It was tedious work, and the challenge of cutting and shifting the heavy granite impressed me as much as the sight of the technicians in goggles making long coils of diamond wire in the factory the day before.
In one of the stonecutting sheds a young man with a hammer and chisel chopped at the edge of a granite slab that was acquiring the look of a curbstone.
As I walked past, the man turned away, but just as he did I saw his aggrieved expression and pained eyes. I kept walking, but later, when the rain grew heavier, I used the storm as an excuse to duck into his work shed and talk to him.
“Mind if I join you?”
“Go ahead, plenty of room.”
He put down his chisel, picked up a sledgehammer, and began slowly slamming chunks off the block. He was a man of medium height, well muscled, with tattoos all over his shoulders and up and down his forearms, decorative ones, none of the boasts or messages that tattooed men sometimes had; many were grinning human skulls. He had sandy hair, blue eyes, and an air of wounded innocence. He seemed uneasy—fidgety, oblique—the demeanor of someone who worked alone and was not quite sure how to deal with a sudden stranger, especially one scribbling in a notebook.
His name was Jesse Minor. He was thirty-five and was born less than forty miles away in the much bigger town of Athens. He’d graduated from Oconee High School in Watkinsville. “It was a mostly white school,” he explained. “The town’s real small, and it’s mostly white too.”
“You have a lot of ink, Jesse.”
“I got these tattoos in Arizona, from a friend who’s a tattoo artist. I said, ‘Cover my arms with skulls’—skulls are cool and badass. This here one on my neck says ‘Reba.’ That’s my daughter. That’s a story.”
He had not slackened; he hammered as he spoke, chunks of granite flying.
“I never worked in a quarry before,” he said, swinging. “I was in construction, in Arizona for eight years. Prescott, a really nice place with lots of work. But the economy went bad, so I come home.” He paused and sized up the block. “Here I am, been here eighteen months. I use this here sledgehammer to clean up the blocks, get them straight. Call it quality control, I guess.”
“How’s the pay?” I asked.
“I started at nine dollars an hour and now I earn eleven. I work six days a week—fifty hours a week. I don’t mind the work, b
ut I’m having a hard time at home.”
“You mind if I make notes? I’m kind of interested.”
“That’s okay.” And he put his hammer down. “Thing is, I’m going through a separation. It’s like this. Brandy—my wife—says she’s going through a midlife crisis, which is really strange, because she’s younger than me.”
“How would you describe her midlife crisis?”
“She decided she wanted to date a younger guy, that kind of crisis. And she got really weird. She says to me, ‘I love you, but I’m not in love with you.’ The hell’s that mean?”
“I don’t know. Did you ask her?”
“Kind of.” He began to pace in the shed as the rain came down. “Everyone knows that tingly feeling goes away after a few months, don’t it? Anyway, I figured I’d give her some space. So I moved out.” Seeing a block of granite moving past on the lift, he snatched his hammer and heaved it and chopped at the block, still talking. “Soon as I moved out, he moved in—the young dude, this guy she was dating.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“He don’t have a car!” He swung the hammer again and a dislodged wedge of stone flew into a gurney with a bang. “I says to her, ‘It ain’t going to be how you want it!’”
“What did she say to that?”
But he wasn’t listening. He was in full cry. “I says, ‘We was a team back in Arizona!’ We went through hard times and was doing pretty good. We was a team!”
He threw his sledgehammer aside and sat down on a bench by the slab of granite that was being buzz-sawed into a pair of curbstones. He lit a cigarette, wagged the match out, and blew smoke.
“When we come back, we ended up in a real slummy area—Sherwood, for Sherwood Forest, near Danielsville, in Madison County. It’s mainly white, a drug-infested trailer community, five or six hundred people. Our trailer was back of the neighborhood.”
