My Corona: Dispatches from West Virginia Under Quarantine
BY IAN WOODE
Part 1: Denial and bargaining — how one man tries to stick his head up his own ass to avoid the COVID-19 panic.
March 15, 2020: Route 60 Walmart — Huntington, W.Va.
“Let’s see if these motherfuckers bought out the goddamn laundry detergent,” the woman said, pushing her buggy down the aisle.
I could hear her, but I didn’t want to turn around. There was too much irritation in her inflection, percussion in her cadence. She was fucking pissed. I smiled slightly at the stock guys, their blue vests unbuttoned and hanging off their chests.
I’ve stocked shelves on Black Friday, on Thanksgiving Day, but I ain’t ever had to put up with this shit. Customers can get antsy over that last $25 microwave getting snatched off the shelves, that X-Box not making it under their Christmas tree — there’s no telling what they’ll do in a case of life or death.
The stock guys stole glances at the woman, ready to bite their tongues ’til blood frothed from their mouths. She wheeled the buggy to a stop in front of an empty shelf.
“Of course they took the last of the motherfuckers, the same motherfuckers I need,” she said, to no one and everyone at the same time.
It was the same feeling my old lady and I had about the eggs earlier that day. She’d fried up the last 4 or 5 that morning — I’d reported Kroger’s[1] was at quarter capacity Friday evening, after I stopped in following a lightly attended meeting in a church dining hall for folks who can’t handle their booze. Bread was depleted, and only three packs of single-ply shit tickets remained on the shelves. Milk was fully stocked. Frankly, I figured by Sunday, there would be another shipment of eggs.
And maybe there was. Maybe those poor stock guys didn’t get the crates off the pallet before shoppers swarmed them like that hive of bees on Nicholas Cage’s face in the Wicker Man remake.
“NOT THE EGGS, NO NOT THE EGGS!”
Or maybe I was just an overly optimistic dumbass — that wasn’t it. Earlier that Friday, I had to be talked out of pulling all my money out of the bank, in case there was a bank run. Yes, I know about the FDIC, and even knowing those banks are on paper insured, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that people would start hoarding cash, too. I mean, if everyone pulled their money, I still don’t see how the FDIC can insure that shit — it’s a government promise, kinda like 50 acres and a mule, or Treaties with the Lakotas.
After perusing the semi-barren aisle Sunday afternoon — we’d been stocking up since Wednesday, no need for another can of beans — there the eggs were.
Four cartons — 100 linear feet of shelving and four fucking cartons.
Two cartons were $7.99 apiece.
The other two were $6.99.
We selected the $6.99 carton of brown eggs, Grade A Large, certified Organic by the USDA. That extra $3.99 made for cute packaging — the lid atop of the typical beige egg seats is a pleasant burnt brown, with two hens frolicking in ferns like vines.
Free to Forage it reads.
Another week of this shit and we’d be foraging all right.
Back in the detergent aisle, the woman whipped her buggy around, practically screaming at the store:
“I can’t wait for this cold shit to be over!”
March 11: Home — Huntington, W.Va.
Whenever my girlfriend cries, she likes to hide her red face and runny eyeliner in the closest pillow or blanket, which — because she’s in charge of 90% of our décor decisions — are approximately within a 3-foot range at all times. This is not to say Misery Macabre is a crier — yes, she’s a bit more emotional than I, the Tin Man, but I’ve been in relationships with women who cried much more. Then again, I was drinking back then, which is all the more reason for anyone to cry.
I chain-smoked cigarettes on the front porch while talking to Michelle on the phone, trying to hammer out what we would be throwing up on this here website. Of course, Michelle and I talked a little bit about the virus, but this was the first night of the supermarket sweep, before the governors and the Used-Car-Salesman-In-Chief declared states of emergency.
We were focused on the West Virginia primary and a couple book reviews. You know, next week’s fluff pieces.
It was the first night of Corona-times, the last night where forgiveness could be shown to the deliberately ignorant, such as I, who held hope that this whole thing would blow over, a passing fad a la Y2K. A fear-driven Black Friday that would lead to a retail hangover Saturday, wherein half of America would wake up and say, “Just where in the hell will I store all these rolls of toilet paper? And why in the hell will I eat Manwich until September?”
Ah, to have those days back — when it was almost fashionable, rather than idiotic, to laugh at the denizens descending on the Dollar General, picking up every last bottle of sanitizer from the store. It was when I could shake my head at the masked ones, without the dreadful anxiety of having none at home myself.
My lungs filled with carbon monoxide and my feet numb from cold, I walked into the house to see Misery covered in a blanket.
“What’s the matter baby?” I asked.
She tossed over, trying to bury her face farther into the pile of throw pillows. I pulled them away and uncovered the tears dripping down her cheeks.
“It’s stupid,” she said, reaching back for the pillow.
I shook my head.
“No, tell me what it is.”
She sat up and wiped the tears away.
“What if you and Rose[2] end up getting it and we all get sick? What if one of us dies?”
Back in 2014, I got gakked out on coke and molly and found myself running into traffic shirtless, and a mental health commissioner decided I ought to chill out for two weeks at a state nut house. Convinced the whole hospital was a ploy to control me, to mold me into some kind of a secret weapon for the CIA — an experiment I believed was being conducted by my own father — I’d latched onto this mantra:
You can’t bullshit a bullshitter!
The idea was, if the other patients and the orderlies were merely paid actors by the federal government, I wasn’t going to let them bullshit me before I’d bullshit them. A lot has changed since those dark days of the Charleston Water Crisis, yet a piece of me subconsciously still holds onto that cliché — and in times of emotional discomfort, I’ll fall back on it. Which explains this line of bullshit:
“Why don’t I go to the casino?” I asked her.
She sniffled and wiped her nose with her sleeve.
“Because you always lose,” she said.
I smiled.
“That’s right. With 350 million people here in this country and only what, 100 cases or something? What are the odds we’re going to get it? If we wind up getting it, best believe I’m going to the slots.”
She smiled.
I wouldn’t classify that line of shit as a lie — because I earnestly believed it. But it was most definitely bullshit, and bullshit can alleviate fear.
Or get you killed.
In the moment, before the literal breadlines formed, we were calm. We were fearless. The Coronavirus was a monster in the sea, an abstract Kraken of our imagination.
March 17, 2020: The Neighbor’s — Huntington, W.Va.
“Hey man, you want to make a little money?” my buddy asked, when I called.
“I got to work until 5, but I might be able to work something out,” I said.
I cut out of work at 3 pm — I had all my shit done and the manager said he’d fudge my hours to a full forty since work was slowing down. After stopping for a carton of smokes, I raced to my house and changed.
Wearing an old work shirt splattered with primer, I walked over the hill to find the porch filled with odd pieces of wood snap lock, a chop saw on an end table, and a jig saw plugged into an extension cord. Inside, I heard a hammer thumping on a piece of wood. I cracked open the door and waved at my buddy — sweat poured from him as he swung his hammer, locking the tongue of one piece of wood into the groove of another.
“Hey man, give me a second,” he said. “I’ll burn one with you and show you what to do.”
Over a cigarette he damned near got killed over — my buddy lit up inside the house — he showed me where the flooring was stacked up in the garage underneath the house. I’ve torn up miles of the shit over the past couple of years, but never laid it down, so I never took note of how each piece has either a tongue or a groove at the end. Once he showed me where to look, I’d sort them out, running them up to the porch and cutting them down with the chop saw.
Around the vents and corners, we had to jigsaw ’em. Despite my protests, my buddy and his brother told me to do my best with it — I only skunked one board, to my surprise.
Behind the house, an old man with long hair and a mustache was burning the old pieces in a little pit. He wore a flannel coat with a hood sewn into the collar — he was the type of old man I’ve known for years, the one who shows up in a pickup truck just to burn shit. Maybe if my buddy’s mom had an itch to scratch, or a car to fix, he’d show up for that, too. The fact he wasn’t drinking a beer right then kindly surprised me. Hoisting the old wood over my shoulder, carefully dodging the dog shit in the front yard, I delivered him kindling.
“What do you think about this shit happening?” he asked me.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“I think it’s a just another way for them to try to take our guns,” he said.
Normally, I’d hold my tongue. Ain’t a reason to get in a fight, especially working a side job. But something in me said, Oh no, not this shit again. It’s like every car wreck, every heart attack, every plane crash is another way for the federals to angle up your gun. They shut down the self-checkout at Walmart — it’s a goddamn gun grab. What, are you going to shoot the virus? Is that how you cure it? Dr. Smith and Dr. Wesson had the cure this whole time!
“I don’t know man,” I said. “Here’s the way I look at it. Over there in Italy, they’re stacking bodies quicker than they can bury them. So if we do nothing, it could get that bad. I don’t know if we have to do all this, but I can see why.”
The old man switched subjects and so did I.
With all but three runs left, my buddy and his brother discovered we’d run out of full pieces — a board with the tongue at one end and the groove at the other. We were trying to get her figured when suddenly, his brother’s wife said:
“They just got a confirmed case up in the Eastern Panhandle.”
As we all know, it became a running joke around the state — we’re too tough for Coronavirus. It was easy to chalk up the lack of reported cases to mountaineer resilience, to the idea that somehow a combination of the toxic cloud hanging over the Chemical Valley, the cloudy tap water coming from the taps, and the three M’s — Moonshine, Mothman, and Meth — somehow inoculated us to this super disease.
Every one of us in that house, everyone I’ve talked to, knew this shit was floating around here. It’s just if your state is too fucking poor to test, then you won’t have a positive. I’d seen the stories of folks showing up to the walk-in clinics, asking for a test, only to be turned away. Hell, Senator Joe Manchin had to crawl up a few asses to even get the test for the first positive. Jimbo Justice even had enough sense to know there were positives in the state — they just hadn’t turned up on the radar.
And to hear it came from my own Eastern Panhandle — that wasn’t a shock. With so many people crossing state lines to work, so many white-collar folks heading to D.C. to plug away at spreadsheets, and with so many junkies running amok, of course the Eastern Panhandle would get hit first. You got a group of haves traveling for work, and a group of have-nots living in squalor.
Plus, more so than other areas of W.Va., people are bunched up in the Eastern Panhandle — it’s no New York situation, but there’s a higher likelihood of transmission in Martinsburg than, say, a cow field in Randolph County.
With all that said, it does feel good to be the champions for once. It’s a pity the trophies they’re going to be handing out are body bags.
March 18, 2020: Route 60-Barboursville, W.Va.
The fear hit me at about 7 pm, in the driver’s seat of my Mustang at the intersection of US 60 and East Pea Ridge, a residential road with a Speedway at one end and a drug store at the other, with a few churches peppered throughout the middle for good measure.
I was on my way to one of those silly little get-togethers I attend to help keep the screw top tight on the rot-gut wine.
I’d already heard about the president signing the National Defense Act; I came across it when I was researching whether or not I’d be getting that virus check. Concerned with an extra grand in my pocket, I filed away the increased production of ventilators as a fact, nothing more than that. After all, what’s the chances I would be needing one of them? I also knew the bodies were stacking so high in Italy, they couldn’t get them burnt fast enough, but that didn’t bother me either. That’s Italy — I’m in West Virginia.
The news still felt distant.
With my dial tuned to NPR, I heard it again — we need to crank out tens of thousands of ventilators if we’re going to keep up with COVID-19. That’s when I felt it. My body went cold, my mind felt hazy.
Is this real? Am I real? Or am I dreaming? Has my entire consciousness been a lie and I’m merely a character in some D-list screenwriter’s first draft? Am I still trapped in the nut house, in a catatonic psychotic state? Is a man who did a cameo in Little Rascals seriously the president right now? Is it 2020? Have I been sober for 2 years, or am I in an alcoholic coma and it’s really 2016?
Then the realization hit: Nope, this is your life. This is our lives. This is the world in which each and every one of us is breathing, shitting, bleeding, loving, hating, cussing, praying, living, and dying in. Newborns and retirees, athletes and invalids, black and white, gay and straight, we are all in this moment.
That’s when the fear hit — it wasn’t the nerves from the banks shuttering, or my job drying up. That’s understandable, even amongst a scoffer such as I.
Nope, it was existential terror: Might not kill me, but it’ll kill people I know. This country will be shut down. All this is entirely possible.
Talk about it, talk about it, talk about it some more — each time I do, I feel a little better, but before long the terror comes back.
It’s like my shin splint.
See, when I worked construction, I developed a searing pain in my left leg — I’d done it for a year, then took three months off to try my hand at hocking life insurance, only to get bounced back in. The crew and I were gutting a burnt house up in Athens, about 2 miles from the center of Ohio University’s campus. Big son of a bitch, three quarters of its roof missing, an outside wall ripped out of the living room. The insurance should have told the homeowner to fuck himself and bulldozed it over, but it was one of those historical register houses, so he was able to bend their arm to go for a remodel.
The age of the house meant the walls were made of plaster — three or four shovel loads into a bag and you got about 30 to 40 pounds right there. Since I was new, I didn’t want to get into an argument with the super right off the bat, so I kept my mouth shut when I heard we weren’t using bags — at first I took it for ignorance, but quickly I learned it was out of cheapness. Instead, we filled up 50-gallon trash cans and dragged them down two flights of stairs, down the front porch, then another flight of stairs to a dumpster at the bottom of a hill. Every load was easily 80 to 100 plus pounds — some loads you’d get lucky and it would mostly be slates. After a morning of doing that, every bit of your body ached and throbbed — by the end of the week, you had no idea how you went on, but you did. Even as the December rain fell, the cold shock of the drops only woke you up at first — everyone slept heading home at the end of the day.
It took a month to gut that bastard, and by the end I could barely stand on my left leg. Every step felt like a hot knife ripping through my shin. When I stopped for a cigarette, I stood on my right leg like a martial master of cancer. Every chance I got, I sat — even in the bed, the pain shot through me.
Finally, at the behest of my girlfriend and others, I went to the ER to make sure it wasn’t a blood clot. Shin splint, they said. They told me to get a brace and wrote a script for muscle relaxers, along with a temporary state medical card. I forgot to follow up on the card, and the script has long been tossed. I have that brace somewhere, but since I’ve gotten out of construction I haven’t had much a need for it — my leg acts up every once in a while, but I can push through it.
Right now, that fear has me ate up like that shin splint once did — when it hits, it hits hard and fast. Overwhelmed, I find myself staring at the ceiling, studying the walls. Nothing else I can do. My heart wants to rip through my chest, my hands jitter and shake as if I’ve been on a liquor binge. I feel naked and skinned, and all I want to do is make it stop.
That’s the trick to COVID-19 — it’s not just washing hands, keeping your distance, and quarantines.
It’s keeping that fear at bay, too.
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[1]For our Northern Brethren, it’s Kroger. I know it’s Kroger. But since we’re South of the Mason Dixon, we throw random syllables into shit — Kroger’s it is. Since I don’t know anyone from Ohio proper — points North of Chillicothe, I can’t a hundred percent say it’s a quirk of the Appalachian dialect or not — this is the land of Warsh Rags after all.
[2]Her daughter. Name has been changed to protect her privacy, although I imagine in the next 15 years you’ll probably hear it. The other night, at the dinner table, she said we ought to kill the rich and take their money. No fucking joke. We got a goddamn Bolshevik on our hands.
