Pepsi was the official non-alcoholic drink of Spanish Row, the bottling plant having been owned by one of its enterprising residents. The Asturians in my family shrub were too proud to sign anti-anarchist and communist statements at Ellis Island, and subsequently redirected to Cuba to mellow out a bit. They made it through Ellis Island in a more amenable state of mind a few babies later. Lured by posters offering mining work in West Virginia, they wound their way through the Alleghenies and northern Appalachians, carrying their stubborn, erect postures into the heart of darkness. Photos show them in tight, cruel shoes and starched collars, staring uncomfortably into the flash of the camera. They were known to abuse cats.
The Asturianos, too proud to refer to themselves as Spaniards, did not take well to the local customs, I am told, or rather the locals did not take well to them. Holed up at the windowless Peso Club down the street from Spanish Row, the Asturianos organized labor after being fired as prison guards for agitation. It was at the Peso that I had my first Pepsi out of a frosty mug pulled from a horizontal deep freezer by a thin guy attired in an impeccable white undershirt. The Peso was cold, winter cold, like the frosty mug, the coldest place I had ever been during the summer. The Asturianos back in Spain, the stay-at-home Monteses and Zapicos, became legendary anti-fascist fighters in the 1930s. Some lived on in exile in Paris as late as the 1990s. I tell their story knowing I am attempting to make identity lemonade out of identity lemons.
From the employment of my grandfather to my junior high school education, the penal colony on Jefferson Avenue, the State Pen, played a greater role in my life than anyone will ever know. My junior high school was overrun by the progeny of inmates from all over the state seeking proximity to Dad’s weekend visitation. These violent miscreants, challenged in basic hygiene, were promptly labeled “dirt balls” and considered genetically predisposed to all sorts of degenerate acts in the restrooms and locker rooms. They played a central role in our needy psyche: they were people we could look down on.
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When I first heard the term “Rust Belt” during my last year of junior high, the rust had barely formed on Moundsville. I immediately assumed this rust belt was a reference to the local repurposing of a fashion accessory as a disciplinary device, a tactic that increased in response to the stresses of rapid deindustrialization. Childhood infractions small and large were reacted to all the same: the belt was released by grimy mill hands, swung with cracking precision, and re-sheathed between frayed belt loops, all in a matter of seconds. The Ohio Valley in the early 1980s was marked by patterns: for every mill closure, bankers closed in on the houses, women dried their eyes with pink Kleenexes, and the belts came off. Then families moved away or fell apart.
I have always wondered whether Moundsville suffers under a curse. The mammoth stone-walled penitentiary we called the “butt hut” was ruled unfit for even prisoner habitation. It was repurposed as a federally funded SWAT team training facility, until it was discovered that the mock explosions were releasing unsafe levels of asbestos. The corrections facility moved to the outskirts of town, in the foothills off a road called Fork Ridge.
Across the street from the abandoned butt hut, the city’s namesake, sixty-nine-foot-tall Grave Creek Mound stands like a big green earthen tit. The Adena mound-building civilization populated this region between 1000 and 200 B.C., or “before the curse,” as we said in school. Our mound is thought to have been built near the end of this period. Early Moundsvillean, amateur archaeologist, and tomb raider Delf Norona dug exploratory shafts into the mound in 1838 and exhumed bodies. Thus we speculate a curse not unlike that of Chief Cornstalk’s curse in downstream Point Pleasant, West Virginia, which local lore claims as the backstory behind The Mothman Prophecies.
There is a distinct possibility that I have personally contributed to Moundsville’s curse. Of many nights spent drinking cheap regional beer on the peak of this venerable structure, one evening stands out in particular.
The late-summer evening was cool, but tired, with the feel that it was finishing off a muggy day. The chill blew off the river as I met up with Chet and Greg at the shopping plaza. We stood around smoking cigarettes, bored and feeling taller than we were. The idea came to Chet to buy a case of beer, but as none of us had ever drunk any, we weren’t sure just how one went about it. Our back was to the drink mart. We talked ourselves into the notion that this purchase should be like any other. We pooled our discretionary income. It came to $8.50, just enough for two six-packs of Rolling Rock and some beef jerky or a case of Iron City Light. We chose the latter. Nobody was hungry.
Chet, an honor student like the rest of us, was a dreamer, unable to focus on anything. His drunken old man railed at him every morning until Chet agreed to pull the lawn mower from the shed in the alleyway and canvass the neighborhood for work. He found plenty. The first half of the summer went by rather uneventfully, until one day Chet was distracted by some flight of fancy and allowed the mower to
