Friday from the Archives: “I Know 8000 Lunatics: Confessions of an Apple Stealing SOB” essay by Michael Parker from NCLR 1993 volume I number 2
by Axel Snyder, Intern
How many of us have a perfect relationship with our hometown? Michal Parker certainly doesn’t. There are many NCLR features discussing small NC towns. But perhaps the first is Parker’s 20-year-old essay, “I Know 8000 Lunatics: Confessions of an Apple Stealing SOB”
Instead of trying to define the inherent undefinability of a small town, Parker asks what a name is: to him, names are words; “words [are] music”. But to the people of Clinton, “names [are] people”, and suggesting otherwise is to dehumanize the very personhood of the town. Clinton cannot be defined in the same way a person cannot be defined: it is in flux, a living thing just like you and I. Parker’s ruminations resonate with many NC residents– “his Clinton” is one of “unbearable heat, lethargic angst, procrastinated sexuality, endless and repetitive conversation, and most significantly, the passage of time in a place tucked between places, a place people passed through.”
Even speaking his town’s name carries its own weight – “The way they say it, Clinton is just a dip in the road. The way I say it, it is a bone blocking my windpipe.” The noise hardly brings back fond memories: it “evokes the strife, rather than the pleasure, of my time there. Clin-un: a clean bite of consonant, clink of sledgehammer against concrete.”
Nonetheless, Clinton still seeps its way into every corner of Parker’s life. “What I know is my impatience with [Clinton], my longing to escape, and it is through the veil of this longing that its streets appear in my work.” Whether intentionally or not, Clinton has marked him. It has a “swampy claim on [his] vowels” and worms its way into his writing: “Names, streets, creeks: concrete Clinton seeps into my work in these ways.”
How many of us have a location that is also a character in its own way? A place that marks us, lays its claim to our consonants and syntax, and still finds its way into our stories?
This essay is one I know hits home for many readers of NCLR, many of whom are also writers. Read the entire short story on Gale Literature or purchase a copy of the 1993 issue.
