The Pit I Was Born In

    My name is Lisa Cole. I grew up in Asheville, North Carolina in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Everyone always looks at that place and talks about how beautiful it is. But it’s not beautiful. It’s ugly. It’s a shiny piece of candy pumped full of poison. For most of my life it was a goddamn pit that I was born in and I thought that I would never get out of there while I was alive.
    I was thirty two years old. I worked as a CNA, a certified nursing assistant. My mom was a CNA before me. She used to say that she was a certified shit wiper. Because that is what it is. If you work in a place like Carolina Cove, where wealthy retirees end up spending the remainder of their lives, you end up wiping the asses of people who have had more opportunity and money than you can ever dream of as they endure the indignities of old age and impending death. My mom worked at one of the less posh nursing homes in the county and eventually just clutched her chest and died after an overnight shift at the age of 56. I think about her, yawning one minute and then dead on the floor the next. I didn’t want to be her. I didn’t want that but every single day stared at me like some grinning devil at the foot of my bed taunting me as each passing minute solidified my fate.
    These thoughts, that devil at the foot of my bed in a trailer I rented with a bunch of roommates haunted me. I woke up in the morning in a cold sweat, knowing how deep I am in debt from a failed attempt at college and a better life. Knowing that there was literally no way out of this. On bad days I would think about driving up to a place called Jump Off Rock and throwing myself off of it. Like the apocryphal Cherokee Princess that is talked about on the Historic Marker sign. At least this mountain hell has a well lit exit. I thought about it a lot. Throwing myself off that rock and hoping to cheat the fate of a wasted life. Then I would realize that with my luck I might live and end up in a county nursing home with mold growing under my tits. My mom talked about seeing that. About how neglected the poor patients were. I decide it’s not worth the risk and get up to make coffee.
    Jody, one of the roommates, is just getting home from her shift at the Waffle House. She is exhausted. She gives me the look that calls for silence until she has had time to get in the shower and sob for a little bit. We all shower sob here. Michelle is still asleep in her room. She sleeps a lot before she goes to work at the paper mill and puts on her dead name and calls herself Mike and has to deal with the rednecks she works with. I worry about her a lot. She is barely holding onto sanity and life. I can feel it. We crazy people on the bleeding edge of poverty can smell each other.
    The coffee smells good. I look at my phone. It’s my day off. I sit around and look through social media crap. Laugh a little at someone asserting I could pull myself up by my bootstraps. Bitch, I ain’t got boots. I sniff the cream in the fridge. It still smells alright, it’s just a week out of date. Pour some in my coffee and then try to wrack my brain to think of ways to make more money. I shower after Jody is done. Tears come as soon as the water hits me. I sink down onto the floor of the tub and muffle my screaming sobs. Have to be careful. Can’t wake up Michelle. Jody will be in bed soon. Between the three of us we could afford that miserable little trailer on Moot Point, a road that was supposed to be funny but instead summed up all of our lives.
    Later that day I called my Dad and he answered the phone. “Lisa, How the fuck are ya girl?”
“I am struggling. I don’t have much money and I work so damn hard and I am so very tired.”
    My father belched loudly into the phone. My heart hurt. He was drunk. “Baby I’m sorry. Listen, come on over to my place tomorrow and I will give you a few bucks. Just to help out. Come by in the morning. I can’t give you much but I can help you out a little.”
That broke me. I finished the phone call, assured my poor disabled dad that I loved him then buried my face in my hands and wept. There is a story we get told as children. That we can grow up and things might be tough but with intelligence and grit it will be ok. In my life though. In the lives of all my friends, nothing was ok. We all knew we were fucked. That working our asses off for a home with a shit ton of roommates was about the best we could expect.
    I cried harder. Then I left the trailer and drove out towards Hendersonville, a town to the south of Asheville to a place just off the highway, the Highland Truckstop. On my days off from Carolina Cove I sell my body in that big, ugly gravel parking lot to whichever trucker will pony up twenty dollars to use me. I have been pretty lucky so far. No one has hurt me. Danny, the cook at the Truck Stop checks up on me in exchange for a hand job once in a while.
    It sounds weird and sick and pathetic I know but when I applied for Food Stamps they ended up giving me twenty dollars for the month and I didn’t feel like dying of scurvy eating nothing but Ramen noodles. Daddy would give me my part of the utilities and hooking would get me groceries. I hate myself for this. I didn’t like being in my 30’s and asking for my dad’s charity. He was a good man.     When mama died it broke him. Shortly after that he lost his left foot to diabetes. He had his social security disability to live on and mama’s life insurance had paid for the little house where I grew up.
    I love the hash browns at the Highland Truck Stop. Danny knows how to make them good. I was reading The Fellowship of the Ring as the moon came up over the mountains. I looked out at the parking lot. It was a slow night at the Highland. Only two trucks all night. A gal named Natalie who was a trucker to pay for her transition. She is a sweetheart but asexual so no money coming in that way. The other is a butch cis gal named Benny. She’s good people and doggedly monogamous with her partner. These two are good eggs but I was a little sad that I wasn’t gonna be able to get some groceries. I asked Danny for some eggs on my “tab.” Wanda, the waitress rolled her eyes and gave me that “eat shit and die” look. She spent a lot of time away from work at Naples Baptist Church. God was the excuse she use to sneer at the queer folks and the sex workers like Jesus never spent any time with people like us.
    Danny was the de facto night manager at the Highland, so he got a say over how business was done. His daddy owned the place and he liked trading food for sex. He was a big, sweaty, musty smelling ghoul but he made good food and I could pay for it with a hand job at the end of the night. It definitely beats eating Ramen everyday three meals a day cause that’s all you can afford.
    One night, a guy asked me why I didn’t go to college. I stifled a laugh. I had tried to go to college. Had a mountain of debt and a good vocabulary to show for it.
    I turned my attention back to JRR Tolkien and got lost in Middle Earth for a while as the world moved around me. I wondered what I might have been there? I played D&D with my friends when I had the time, which wasn’t often. I always played some kind of noble. If I couldn’t be rich in real life, why not do it in a game? A few hours passed as I read about the trek up into the Misty Mountains and the fateful decision to travel through the mines of Moria.
    The bell on the door rang. A tall elderly man walked in. He was slouching, slightly stooped over the way tall old men tend to do. He looked around with gray watery eyes and smiled at me with tobacco stained teeth. “Food good tonight?”
    I nodded and flirted back. Fighting the desire to throw up my eggs. This guy could help buy a pack of hamburger or maybe some green beans. It was survival. That was all that mattered.
“I’m Skip,” he said. “Mind if I join you, young lady?”
“Not at all,” I said.
    He ordered some peach pie and coffee and began asking me what I was reading. I told him and he smiled. Talked about Tolkien for a while. He was at least being nice which was more than I can say for most of the men who talk to me at the Truck Stop. “Do you ever get tired, Lisa?” He asked with strange seriousness. Not a hint of mirth in his voice.
    “I’m always tired, Skip. I don’t remember not being tired.” Skip nodded and sipped his black coffee. His gray eyes regarded me in the strangest way. It wasn’t the syrupy simping way most older men who seek out prostitutes sometimes affect. And it wasn’t the predatory gleam that every sex worker knows so well. Nor was it the apologetic, half shamed look you sometimes see.
    “It’s hard, being tired all the time.” He said quietly as he wiped his mouth on his napkin. He had good manners. Didn’t talk with his mouth open. Didn’t make lewd comments.
I stared out the motel room window. It was the old Mountaineer Motel in Hendersonville. Skip was snoring after he had gotten off into my mouth. I went to the bathroom to wash the taste away. I looked at myself in the mirror. Make-up smudged. Bone tired. I wanted to cry. Skip had paid twenty bucks for the blow job. I would be goddamned if I let myself cry near where Skip or any other John might see me.     I dressed and let myself out of the room. Heard the door lock behind me. Trudged back to the car. Got out on Highway 25 and started back to the Highland.
    I wanted to be anywhere but there in that town. Whoring myself out. Wiping asses for rich folks in heaven’s waiting room. I screamed for a solid five minutes to vent my anxiety and frustration.
Danny leered at me as I walked through the door. He smirked and chewed on a toothpick. It was just me, him, and Wanda. She was wiping counters looking like she smelled shit on her upper lip.
    I sat down and waited to re-order coffee. When the bell rang at the door. A man walked in, wiping his shirt. He was covered in blood. Wanda gasped. I was stunned. Danny reached for his phone. The stranger pointed a pistol at him.
    “You touch that phone and I’ll shoot you dead.” the stranger said matter of factly.
    “Take what’s in the register. We don’t want no trouble.” Danny stammered.
    The stranger backed the hammer on his big revolver. The click filled the restaurant. Danny’s eyes darted toward the attached convenience store.
    “The clerk over there decided to get brave so I blew his fucking brains out.” the stranger said with a sick little grin. Wanda took a step and the stranger, quick as a wink shot her square in the middle of her chest. She didn’t fly back like in the movies. She just fell to the floor, twitched a little and blood drained from the new hole in her body. Danny made to charge the man, tackle him but the stranger fired three times into his bulk and Danny fell too.
    I screamed. The stranger pointed the gun at me. I could only see the barrel. It was so big. Everything else was blurred. I tried to focus on anything else but all I could see was that barrel. All my worries about bills and life were gone. I wanted to live. I knew I was going to die. The stranger said: “They made me do that, you know. They moved when I told ‘em not to. You understand that right?” I nodded tears burning my eyes and cheeks. “I don’t want to kill you young lady but I need a ride out of here. Give me your car keys. Put em on the table. Nice and slow.” I slowly reached into my purse and got the keys. I put them on the table exactly like he asked. “Good girl,” he purred in an awful throaty voice.
I recognized that sound. That predatory timbre in his voice. He was eyeing me. Playing with me. He reached down for keys. I knew I was going to die. I stabbed him with the fork. I screamed with rage, anxiety, pain, indignation and all the thousands of humiliations I had suffered at the hands of men like him. If I was going to die he would remember me. The gun went off. Loud, deafening but I kept stabbing and stabbing the fork sinking into whatever I could find in my blind fury.
    He had shot out the window behind us. I was covered in blood. But I couldn’t find where I was bleeding. I checked myself. He had missed. He was on the floor, dead, perforated by so many stab wounds to the neck, face, and chest. I started laughing and weeping all at once. I was happy to be alive. So much carnage around me. The bell on the front door rang. Skip was standing there. Open mouthed.     He caught himself and his voice became hard. “Get up Lisa, we have to get you out of here.”
I walked out with Skip’s arm around me. I felt numb. I had nothing left inside of me. The rage I vented on the stranger had drained me completely. Skip spoke gently but insistently. “Listen to me. You need to get in your car and go home. Drive the speed limit. Don’t stop for anyone or anything. Get those clothes off before you can get in your car. Come around back with me.” Skip grabbed some clothes from his car. A dirty Georgia Bulldogs t-shirt, some sweatpants. It was all too big for me. He grabbed a hose from the side of the building and held it for me to wash the blood off. He put my blood stained clothes into a black plastic trash bag. I was in a daze. I could barely follow what was happening now.
    He was so calm. Terrifyingly calm. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“Appreciating a fellow artiste, ” Skip grinned again. His face was a mask of wrinkles. I shivered. Glee sparkled in those gray eyes of his. “They will just blame this one on me. I followed you back here to finish my night’s entertainment. Then I watched you dispatch that man back there. It was magnificent. It reminded me of… me.” He laughed then, this weird giddy giggle.
“You’re the luckiest girl in the world tonight, Lisa. Take this bag. Burn the clothes. I will sit down inside and prepare for my big reveal.”
“Why?” I croaked out, trembling at this stooped, tall elderly man.
“Because Lisa, you killed a man tonight. I could never bring myself to kill another budding artist. Now run along before my goodwill runs out and I decide to finish what I planned. Burn the clothes.” Skip turned and walked around the building.
I ran. I ran to my car. Started it up and drove away just as he had instructed. I went home. Changed. Burned all the clothes as he had instructed. I showered and passed out crying and sobbing. I don’t know what I was thinking after that. I woke up wondering if it was all a terrible dream.
Jody and Michelle were talking about the news that morning. The Blue Ridge Parkway killer had been apprehended after he ended up killing a man who attempted to rob him at the Highland Truck Stop in Arden, NC. The Parkway Killer had been active for forty years. He had killed 86 women in that span of time. Always transients, runaways, or sex workers. People who he said: “No one would look too hard for.” Robert Anson was Skip’s real name. He had been many things in his life. A delivery driver, a sheriff’s deputy for Transylvania County, a security guard, a deacon at his Baptist Church that he had attended his whole life. A devoted husband and father. His jobs allowed him plenty of time to hunt and kill. You may have seen the news talking about this.
    I quit my job that afternoon and left Asheville. That was ten years ago. I live in Abilene, Texas now. I work as a bank teller now. I never killed anyone else, I promise. Things are better here. I think about that night often. How close I came to being number 87. How my rage and fear saved me from the robber and indirectly from Skip. The pattern broke for me that night. Things are better here. I make enough money to live a simple life and honestly that’s ok. I even hear the President is looking at forgiving student loans. It’s a strange world we inhabit. I can’t stop thinking about the confluences of events that recreate entire lives in an instant. I felt that. I experienced it. I killed a man and saved my life twice.