story written in 2003, unpublished

The West Virginia Town That Loved An Imposter

June Bug and I were milling in the floodlights of Gus’s store looking at his bike. The knobby tires were mud-caked and a license plate was bent over the handlebars, serving as a shelf. He lit a cigarette. “I got a call one night,” he said. “There were two Jewelry Nabbers sitting up at the BP.”
“Jewelry Nabbers?” I asked.
“You know, a bunch of people sitting in the gas station parking lot.”
He spoke, as he always does, as if he were also chewing ice. “It was probably a month ago. The scanner was like There are two Jewelry Nabbers sitting at the BP on Main Street. I was like, boom, I was there. It took, at max, a second. Man, I was there. I was like, boom, I was there.”
He acted out the experience of arriving and stopping on his bike. “Well, I didn’t see any cars. Turn around, and boom, there it was-- a van and a car. Some people were sitting there, chit chatting and carrying on.”
“What were they doing?”
“Sitting there talking. These girls came out of the van. I was like, Holy moly, uh uh uh. I never saw something funnier.”
He drew on his cigarette.
“We got another call, over here on Chicken Farm Road. There was a bunch of ‘em that was stabbing each other. I was there in two seconds. You got to go down a hill, down by my Cousin and Aunt’s house, across the creek and over the hill. And you can’t see nothing. It’s all dark. When I got to the blacktop, my whole bike was covered from the front to the back in mud, weeds, grass. I pedaled that bike so fast. Whoosh. I was there. Two Jewelry Nabbers were beating the hell out of each other. It was like, Cut the fight! Here comes the law! I was hitting the brakes, laid the bike down, started chasing one. The other one jumped in the car and took off. Didn’t have no back up. No nothing. 10-80 Valley Mart.”
“What’s 10-80?”
“10-80 means you’re clear. And those two Jewelry Nabbers were 10-80. That night, I was
tired, you know. I was up for four days, straight, no sleep, no eat, no nothing. Boy, when I got to the house, and I hit that couch, I was like thrown out. It was like, boom, I was out of it. That’s how dang tired I was. They were like, We need you right now! I was like, Sorry, man. Click. Turned the ringer off.”
Annie came out of the store and told Willie, A.K.A. June Bug, to come back inside. He tossed the cigarette down and we walked into the store. He started stocking coolers but looked ready for patrol. A gold plastic Whirlwind security badge was pinned on an orange shirt reading, Latch Key Summer 91. He had a BB gun, in a holster, on his right hip. Out of his back pocket hung a red and white striped package of Beech Nut Chew. He stopped working for a moment to adjust his dentures--filling their cavities with pink goo then popping them back into his mouth with the ease of tossing a handful of party nuts.
June Bug is disproportionately muscular, like a jockey with thick legs. When he walks he throws his feet out in front of him, as if he were kicking at the edges of leather chaps. He has a buzz cut and a tuft of coarse blonde hair on his chin. Dark circles ring around his brown eyes, which are usually blinkless and glossy. A jutting jaw protrudes from his otherwise flat face, making him look like he’s biting his bottom lip.
I could see, through the store window, a cyclist pulling into the lot. It was Eric, June Bug’s best friend, an amateur inventor who would be accompanying us on the patrol. I introduced myself and asked if he frequently went on trips with June Bug.
“As often as I can--” he said, “with all the safety precautions.” He took off his blue Bell helmet and revealed a folded napkin underneath. He was pear-shaped and wearing wire-rimmed glasses. A WWJD key chain dangled out of his pocket. “Willie knows why.”
June Bug walked outside. “Why is that?” I asked.
“I was hit by a car a few months ago,” he said.
“He came out of the Go-Mart and wasn’t paying attention,” June Bug said.
“Yea,” Eric said, solemnly.
“Boom!” June Bug recalled. “Ran right into him.”
“There was this woman, who was getting ready to pull out,” Eric explained.
“Eric!” June Bug hollered, reliving the experience. “And boom!”
“By the time I saw her, it was too late to put on my brakes. I was like, Ah!, and she daggone hit me, and my bike, right head-on. Bent the front rim and totaled the front part. I hobbled around the front of her hood. I had put two or three dents in it. Almost lost my glasses. My glasses fell off my face and on the road.”
Eric looked at both of us. “That’s why I’m pretty much now wearing a helmet and reflective vest,” he said. “I also have a headlight and taillight on my bike: so people will be able to see me.”
Annie walked out of the store. “Willie,” she said. “Lock the door for me. It’s midnight.”
June Bug did as he was told and the three of us got ready for the ride. We lined up–June Bug leading, me behind him and Eric taking up the rear. We pulled onto West Virginia State Road 34 and began June Bug’s patrol.

The Making of Plastic Badges

June Bug started his nightly rounds, a few years ago, after he found a church door unlocked. He called the Hurricane Police Department and waited until morning for an officer to arrive. When one did he called attention to the unlocked door. The cop concurred that it was a problem and promised to inform the owner. “A couple days later,” June Bug said, “I got the credit.”
Everyone on the Hurricane Police Department knows June Bug, who acquired the nickname for his propensity to flutter around, or travel far distances. Their first experience with him was when he, as a child, illegally boarded a stopped train. He rode to Charleston, 25 miles away, and was noticed by police officers there. The Charleston PD called the Hurricane PD and asked if they knew a kid named Willie Miller.
Around this time, the cops also noticed that he obsessively admired them. “When he was real little,” Officer Mike Mullins explained, “he’d come over and wash cars. You’d hear spraying, look and there’s Willie, washing the cruisers, even if you just had them washed. We’d just wait until he’d get done and give him a couple dollars.”
They are used to his good intentions and awry logic. “He’s not retarded,” Mullins said. “He’s just slow.”
Officers soon suspected that his family members were mismanaging his Social Services checks. So they took over his finances. When he became an adult, they found an apartment for him. Now they keep him supplied with bicycles, buy his groceries and let him relax at the station. “We’ve taken care of him for so long that he is part of our little family here,” said Mullins.
June Bug recognizes the degree to which the Hurricane PD has taken care of him. And, for better or worse, he fantasizes that he’s one of them. Mullins remembers a time when Willie was consistently getting hit by cars. The police gave him headlights, which he altered to look like police lights. “He took magic markers and painted the lenses blue and red,” he said. “If he thought a car was going too fast, he took the switch and turned it on and off fast enough that it made the lights blink.”
Because he had grown up believing he was a cop, residents of Hurricane, population 6,000, play along. “He has a little ticket book and tries to write people tickets,” his special education teacher from high school, Ms. Sandra McCormick, said. “We just laugh at it or say, ‘Ok, Willie, Give us a ticket.’”
Mullins believes that June Bug reciprocates his appreciation for the town through his patrols. He looks for buglars, broken windows and unlocked doors. As Mullins said, “He’s just trying to give back to Hurricane.”

Checking Doors

The first car to pass us on our patrol was a police cruiser. The driver dragged his light across the three midnight cyclists, focused on June Bug and drove on. From behind, I watched June Bug riding. He pumped his legs furiously, coasted, pumped furiously again, all the time throwing the weight of the BMX back and forth beneath him. He arched his back and rolled his shoulders forward. His white plastic seat was angled upwards like a launching shuttle, which, in conjunction with a pair of silver pegs on the front axles, allowed him to prop his feet up like a chopper-rider when cruising down a hill.
At the first stop, a Kawasaki dealership, June Bug aimed his bike straight for the door. He reached out his hand and yanked on the handle. He then leaned into a sharp curve and approached the next door. “This is what I do,” he said.
We proceeded into neighborhoods where June Bug flashed glances between each house. The area was serene: Only white birdbaths contrasted the night and green lawns. We then rode into downtown Hurricane to check a cable TV station and church. We stopped behind a big white bank to catch our breaths.
“You guys are a lot faster than me,” Eric said, pulling up.
“Well, Randall’s rode for a long time,” June Bug explained. “And me, I got used to it.”
“I’d have to have a motor on my bike just to keep up,” Eric said. He laughed nervously.
“I bet you could build one,” I said. “I don’t doubt it. You never know what the imagination will serve. We ought to show this guy the CB radio I built,” Eric said.
“Now’s not the time, Bubba.”
“What?” I asked.
“It’s just something I built from scratch,” he explained. “I took an ordinary CB radio, a DC fan assembly, two lead-acid batteries, a sheet of plywood, a military backpack frame and built a communication backpack out of it.”
I said I would love to see it. We got on our bikes and headed toward Eric’s house. On our way, we passed by a graveyard, down from which some trucks were working. The flood lights illuminated large piles of gravel. As we approached an intersection, a car was coming from the factory’s direction. June Bug was in the lead and crossed the road.
“Bubba, watch out!” he yelled back to Eric. Eric approached the intersection and stopped. The car went by at about ten miles per hour. Eric looked both ways, stood up on the pedals and proceeded across the intersection.
“That was a close one,” June Bug exclaimed. And Eric looked relieved.

Neighbors

Hurricane lies 25 miles west of Charleston and 35 miles from Ohio. It is a town mixed with storied streets, with names like Chicken Farm Road, and new subdivisions, with names like Harborland Estates. The area made national news twice in the last decade—once, when Andrew Jackson Whitakker Jr., a local construction worker, won the 314.9 million dollar PowerBall Lottery, and, again, when the neighboring town of Nitro produced a chemical that exploded and killed 300,000 in India.
It is located in Advantage Valley, a triangular space stretching between industrial cities in West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio known for their mining and petrochemical industries. Most of the residents are employed in larger nearby cities, which gives Hurricane a distinctly residential feel.
State newspapers have paid attention to the area recently because Shawnee Hills, a five-county mental health facility, closed due to bankruptcy in 2001. All of the residents were shuffled to other smaller mental health facilities. As a result, the smaller service centers have had to shift from recreational services, such as job coaching, to residential health care. Every mentally challenged resident of West Virginia is entitled to 180 hours of job coaching. Yet, now, they must wait up to three months before they get assistance. Hence a lot more mentally challenged folks are living in small towns with little institutional guidance.
Hurricane, as a community, has accommodated its mentally challenged citizens. The folks at Gus’s store have given June Bug a job, which he can work at his own pace. His boss drives him to appointments and pays him for mopping the floors and stocking coolers. A local barbershop cuts June Bug’s hair for free. Pizza Plus lets him eat on a tab and calls Officer Mullins, who withdraws money from June Bug’s account, to pay it. “As soon as he gets in his core little area,” Mullins said, “he has all the help he’ll ever need.”
June Bug isn’t the only mentally challenged resident tended to by the town. A school bus picks up Billy and takes him to work as a Hurricane High School janitor. The bank cashes Ronny’s Captain D’s checks, even though he doesn’t always understand the amount. And grocery store attendants help him pay. “If Ronny wants to go in and get a gallon of milk,” Ms. McCormick says, “the attendants tell him to give them a five and they’ll give him back change…The community is very tolerant and accepting of them.”
A lot of the mentally challenged residents have routines which folks have come to expect. Billy goes by the fire department regularly, for example, and June Bug visits the police station. If these citizens break the routine, residents interpret it as cause for alarm. Rocky Saunders serves as an example. As McCormick said, “He has a routine that he goes to Al’s on certain days of the week and then he goes over to A to Z grocery store and gets his check cashed. And then he goes to the deli and gets food. If he doesn’t do that then Burgess, who works in the deli, she’ll call and say, ‘Hey I haven’t seen Rocky for a couple of weeks.’”
The patterns are complemented by fixations. “Even though they grow up,” McCormick says, “mentally, these kids get stuck between the ages of about five and 12. So they are like the young kids who still have that one thing they really like.”
Eric likes inventors. June Bug likes cops and bikers. Rocky loves Jeff Gordon. Billy likes firemen. Ronny likes truckers. And these fixations provide Hurricane residents with a way to relate to their mentally challenged neighbors. “People find out about it and they contribute to that,” McCormick said. “The kids just love it.”

Copy

When we arrived at his apartment, Eric opened the door to a long stairway with tire marks along the white walls. We heaved our bikes up and parked them inside. His apartment was sparsely filled—a kitchen table, a couch, a roll of paper towels on a counter. He had accented the space with a glow-in-the-dark bedspread, light-up Star Trek Enterprise poster and shelf cluttered with Back to the Future DeLoreans. I spotted a biker glove, perforated at the knuckles, stuck to his refrigerator. Penny-sized magnets were glued onto it. “What’s this?” I asked.
“An experiment of mine,” Eric said. “I’m trying to make a so-called magnetic glove. I have a theory for somehow being able to intensify the fields of all these magnets through a power source. And I want to be able to move metal objects from a few foot distance.”
June Bug, who had gone to sit at the kitchen table, was fiddling with a pizza cutter. Eric wiggled his hand into the glove and stretched it out in the direction of his friend. “I’d like to be able to see myself make that pizza cutter come towards me. I could just reach out my hand and it would go Ka-king!”
Eric put the glove down and we walked over to his prized invention: The Communication Pack. It was leaning against a windowed wall and was as he described: an army issue backpack frame attached to a large plywood board. Yellow sponge foam was added to protect a potential wearer’s back. Two batteries, two fans, two volt meters, a CB and antenna were fixed to the board with erector set mounting plates. It looked identical to a WWII Coordinate Caller’s Radiopack.
“All that, right there, took me roughly one month to build. I didn’t go by any book. I just played it by imagination,” he explained, proudly. “I understood how a CB works in a car, but the key to the project was I had to think, What’s the equivalent of a car battery?”
He pointed to two small black boxes. “So I got it running off two rechargeable lead-acid batteries. They’re an experimental power supply. The only current bug I have in it is that one of these batteries fluctuates; it doesn’t hold a charge.”
June Bug went over to the pack, picked up the microphone and said, “Anybody out there working in Hurricane tonight?”
“You have to turn it on,” Eric said. He began fiddling with the power supply.
“Anybody out there,” June Bug said again.
Eric then told the story of the pack’s debut, which was the occasion of his and June Bug’s meeting. “I was mainly out and about in the town of Hurricane,” he explained, “performing an experimental test run to see how far my pack could actually get on its own.”
He described walking into Gus’s while Willie and an attendant named Bethany were working. “Willie asked about the pack,” Eric said, “and Bethany thought it was real impressive.”
June Bug shook his head.
“She was impressed by it,” Eric emphasized.
“No, she wasn’t.”
Eric looked hurt.
“She said I could possibly get it patented.”
“Cause you were working on it?”
“I know it’s already been invented,” he said, “but not every invention will work the same.”

Quince and Budweiser

The store at the corner of 60 and 32 is known as “Gus’s.” It is located across the street from a junkyard more filled with space than cars. June Bug was sleeping behind it when Gus, the owner, discovered him and offered him a job. The new employee showed the owner his appreciation by calling him, thereafter, “Dad.” When Gus sold the store to Allen, the second owner kept June Bug on staff. June Bug transferred the paternal title to Allen.
Allen remembers the first time his employee used the title. June Bug, late one night, was riding back from St. Albans, 12 miles away, and lighting a cigarette on the side of the road. He was clipped by a speeding car. The EMTs called Allen. “Everyone was calling me at 2, 3 o’clock in the morning, saying, ‘Your son got hit.’ I woke up. I was like, ‘I don’t have a son.’” He figured it was June Bug and drove to the hospital.
Allen’s managerial style, anyway, is more fatherly than formal. June Bug has quit many times, mostly over women, and Allen always takes him back. “He calls you and says, ‘I quit. I ain’t coming no more.’ He likes the girls,” Allen explained, “and if one of the girls is being friendly to the customers, he gets jealous. He gets up and quits. I call him. He says, ‘No, no, I’m not coming back.’ Two or three days later, ‘Dad, I’m broke, can I come back?’ ‘Okay, Okay.’”
Marsha is one of these attendants who June Bug has quit over. She is 25 years old, has curly blonde hair and rides ATVs. She has an exasperated, flirtatious style with the customers. When June Bug works with Marsha, he entertains her with fantastic stories of love. “He plays to have like six or seven girlfriends,” Marsha said. “There was this one girl. She was in a wheelchair and Willie loved her to death.”
One time Marsha put up a sign on the front door that read, “Wanted: Girlfriend for Willie.” The customers thought this was hilarious because as much as Willie is known and taken care of by the community, he is also its comic relief.
Hence, June Bug stories abound. There was the time that he couldn’t figure out how to apply the brakes on a four-wheeler and rode through a wall of lattice. Witnesses say he created a cartoon-like outline of a head and shoulders. There was the time that he was riding to a call, chasing an ambulance, and ran into the vehicle’s back doors. Then there was the time when he requested a steak for his 29th birthday and, after ordering it, took an hour to chew through it. There was the time June Bug, claiming to be an FBI agent, frisked a stranger. There was the time Gus took him to Philadelphia and he told everyone he went to Lebanon.
There was also the time he was arrested after calling in a burglary. “I had a store in Barbersville,” Gus explained. “It just happened that the store got robbed. The alarm company called the cops and Willie called me from the payphone because he was there five or 10 minutes before it happened. I told Willie, ‘Okay, Stay outside and wait for the cops to get there.’
“Willie went in, from where they broke in, to see what they did. The cops pulled over and saw him in there. He’s not known there, like he is in Hurricane, so they pulled a gun on him and arrested him. Willie, I don’t know why, carries about 100 empty lighters in his pockets. When the cops arrested him, they had to frisk him. They pulled all the lighters out and lined them up. He was yelling, ‘Gus!’ I said, ‘Son, Son.’ He was crying. When the police emptied his pockets they knew he was not all together.”

Ascension

After leaving Eric’s house we rode into a neighborhood nearly tucked underneath Interstate 64. Large black masses of mountains struck up from the landscape. Eric and June Bug stopped in front of a house with a small bicycle leaning against a wall. I pulled up to hear Eric saying, “Willie, it’s up to you man. If you want to go to the knob, we’ll go to the knob.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” June Bug replied. “Take Randall up there. He’s never been.”
He started speaking in a serious tone. “You’re going to have to back us up, Eric. You’re the one with the headlight. Randall, he doesn’t have a light. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have any form of reflection at all on his bike.”
They looked at my bike and disdainfully focused on a dusty orange sticker.
“I have one reflector, but it’s so dead it won’t work,” I said.
June Bug and Eric nodded and we took off toward the mountains.
“What is this place?” I asked June Bug.
“I call this the knob,” he explained.
“Does anything go on up here?” I asked.
“Nope. Just sit back and watch the view,” June Bug said. He stretched the last word out like a panorama. “This is where I come at night when I get pissed off, or I get mad, or I don’t get my way.”
I had heard of the site before, but under a different name-- Heaven Hill. Supposedly, from it’s summit, the lights of downtown Hurricane form a question mark.
When we passed under the highway, the road to the knob became severely steep and rutted like a washboard. We rode as far as we could and then dismounted. We began pushing our bikes. The woods to either side were intensely dark. June Bug’s scanner was blaring from his hip. We heard rustling behind us, the sound of tires on gravel. “Here comes a car!” June Bug yelled, with an air of crisis.
A lowered Chevrolet Camero passed us slow. June Bug stared into its tinted windows. “That’s the one that the cops are looking for,” he growled. It passed and we watched its lights drive slowly across the mountain top.

Ink and Water

June Bug’s patrols have resulted in three arrests. All of them occurred one night when some kids tried to steal a van from a transmission shop. The hoodlums got the vehicle started, but couldn’t get it in gear. Having gone this far, they pushed it out of the garage and into the road. Willie, on bike, spotted them. He started chasing the van, until it rolled onto a curb. The boys jumped out of the doors. June Bug chased them through alleyways and neighborhoods. Every time he passed a house he yelled, “Call 911 ! Officer needs backup!”
Someone heard his cries and reported the emergency. The dispatcher called Officer Mullins, who was on duty, and asked if he needed help. Mullins recalled the moment: “I was like, ‘It’s 3 o clock in Hurricane, where there’s nothing in the world going on, what are you talking about? I’m just driving around.’”
She told him that someone was in an alleyway yelling, “Call 911! Officer needs backup!” Mullins said, “Oh, Okay,” and took off. He saw Willie chasing the kids and caught up with them in a subdivision. He arrested the boys.
Despite this success, Mullins doesn’t ask June Bug to do anything police-related. He worries that he might stumble into a dangerous situation and get hurt. McCormick agrees and doesn’t think people supporting June Bug’s police fantasies is a good idea. She cites the fact that his fantasy exists only as long as people from Hurricane are involved. As soon as an outsider enters the picture, June Bug’s actions can look downright bizarre or threatening.
She cites the time June Bug almost got shot. It was 3 A.M., rainy, and a woman from out of state pulled into the Go-Mart to get gas. Willie didn’t recognize her and approached her window to write her a ticket.
When the woman went inside the Go-Mart, she said to an attendant, “I just saw this guy. He looked wild coming up on that bike. He pulled out a little plastic badge and was giving me a ticket. I was in fear for my life.”
The attendant consoled her that that was just Willie.
The woman replied, “I don’t care who he is, here, like this, in the middle of the night. He was real lucky I didn’t have my gun lying on the seat. If he had opened the door, I would have probably shot him.”
Although McCormick discourages people from playing along with June Bug, she doesn’t think Hurricane residents will change their behavior. “You try to educate them, that this is not a good idea,” she said, “but it’s hard to change people. They think they are doing him a favor.”

Foggy Vista

When we arrived at the summit, we stopped in a curve of worn dirt. Beer bottles and clothes were scattered amid clumps of grass. We leaned our bikes down, mud caking in the pedals, and looked at the darkened hills.
“When you cross the state line--” June Bug said, “Mountains, that’s all it is. There’s a tunnel. There’s this big old, huge river.”
He started telling a story about a time he lived in Florida. “I loved my job,” he said, full of sadness. “I loved my wife. I had it made. I came home one night and wasn’t into it. I said, ‘I’m going back to West Virginia.’”
Eric nodded and offered a story. “That’s the way it is with me and Barbara right now,” he
said. “I’m so heartbroke right now.”
We looked at him. “Me and her, we’re not even currently speaking, not even talking or
looking at one another. She’s a rehab student,” Eric explained. He works as a janitor at a nearby mental health institution. “I can’t really associate with rehab students. Kind of like company policy.”
“Policy rules,” June Bug lamented, as if it were another example of cosmic injustice.
“You ever see that movie, or show, on TV?” June Bug asked. “You go around a track, and race with everybody else in the mountains? Well, I did that.”
“Where did you go?” I asked.
“I went on a hiking trip,” he said. “Furthest journey I ever took. I was probably about sixteen. Fell Heights. A pier. Mountains. I went hiking. You know people loading up their mountain bikes and going on hiking trips?”
June Bug scoped the horizon. “Man, you talk about a bike loaded down with crap,” he continued. “I had almost six tubes, four patches, clothes. Man, I had that bike loaded down and everything-- tires, intertubes, patches, headlights, bicycle pump. I had that thing loaded down with brake gear, brake cables, brake tubes.”
“Just about everything,” Eric interjected.
“I had --what are them clothes?-- a snow suit. I had that on. Hurricane PD stopped me. Huntington Police stopped me. Trio cops stopped me. They were like, ‘Where you headed?’ ‘I’m headed south. I’m going on my hiking journey.’ Man, you want to talk about being on top of the world? I was on top of it. There were women there, son, on mountain bikes.”

We straddled our bikes and started down the hill. All I could hear, besides the whooshing wind, was the rattling of bikes on the rutted dirt road. June Bug made it down first. I could hear Eric’s brakes squealing behind me. Without a light, I watched June Bug’s silouette level out and pass underneath the highway. When I got there, June Bug looked around.
“What did you think of that ride there, Randall?”
“It was nice,” I replied, invigorated.
Eric pulled up.
“It was a blast too, wasn’t it Bubba?” June Bug said.
Eric looked flushed.
“Son, you got to ride that bike,” June Bug said.
“I know,” Eric said. “I didn’t want to risk getting myself hurt.”
“Bubba, you got me to take care of you, and that’s the bottom line.”
“Oh, I know that,” he said, smiling and bashful.
We pulled our handlebars around again and started to ride into town. “Willie’s little knob,” June Bug said. “Every inch of it. That’s why we call it sweet home knob.”