It’s really easy to ruin a wedding. I mean, to my knowledge, I’ve never done it. But I’ve seen it done enough times that it doesn’t seem that hard. A father-son duo of leering alcoholics – imagine Ken Griffey Jr. and Senior during that one magical season in Seattle, only with crass comments about 16-year-old girls and (I can only hope) eventual trips and falls through glass coffee tables – managed to do it at the recent wedding of a friend. I’ve had a hard time getting the raw barfy sadness of their co-inebriation out of my head in the week since. I see the kid slumped over in the chair as if lobotomized, then jolting upright to yell the name of someone who isn’t in the room. I see the Tostito-encrusted lips of the dad, laughing at something I said and making me feel terrible about it. But I assume those visions will fade in time.
The thing that has stayed with me most since the wedding is a lot harder to pin down. The idea of these two in the same house – downing double rum-and-cokes and having incoherent arguments about the New York Jets, probably? – is terrifying and a distinct bummer. But the town in which the wedding took place is a slow-motion catastrophe.
The name of that town is Martinsville, Virginia, and it’s best known among people who bother knowing about things like this as the home to Martinsville Speedway, the shortest racetrack on the Nascar circuit. The track is quiet most weeks out of the year, and I saw it only twice – looming up, the asphalt darker than the night, when we drove in, and then prone beneath fallen leaves on the way out. Its impact is everywhere – a barbecue place in town is rebranding itself: “Pigs R Us” becomes “The Checkered Pig”. And every place in town that can even remotely justify doing so is festooned with a banner or license plate or bunting advertising some racer or other. The faces at the breakfast buffet in the hotel seemed to be modeled on Nascar’s aesthetic, too – prim churchgoing goatees or bushy mustaches, camo baseball hats and t-shirts with cars on them.
Thanks to Wikipedia, I know that Martinsville is also home to a bunch of ex- and current athletes (Lou Whitaker! Todd and Randy Hundley! Several NFL punt returners!), the second-highest teen pregnancy rate in the state and (drum roll, motherfuckers) the first-highest STD rate in the state. Because I am a professional journalist who knows how to use popular “web search” engines, I know that Martinsville High School had 30 pregnant students on the first day of school in 2008, and that a Teen Health Center on the campus of the high school offers STD tests and family planning advice. And that parents can opt out of having their kids hear it. And that some do.
From having been there, I can’t say that any of this surprises me. Neither can I say that I’m especially proud of the strange, irritated feeling my un-surprise gives me. I feel, sort of, as if I’m too ready to break out the uncharitable condescension towards “those people” with their one-Baptist-church-for-every-eight-people burg and their surly looks and unfashionable clothes; I’m a little too in-touch with the gnawing, bitter (and not totally fair or unfair) reaction that these people are somehow responsible for the macro-scale fuckery of George W. Bush.
The thing that has stuck with me about Martinsville, though, was how disheartened it all seemed. My friend’s bride loves her home, but will almost certainly never be moving back. College, law school, New York and marriage have made her life bigger, but there’s also very little to go back for. People from Martinsville that I spoke to at the wedding gave me the unofficial unemployment figure of 25% for the town (official figures are an even 20%); a sign at the bowling alley (fucking terrifying, by the way, in that unique way that bowling alleys can be) warned guests against wearing hoodies or work boots or “gang-related clothes.”
The factories that once made the town fairly prosperous are either closed or barely open. The furniture industry fled to China, the textile factories closed years ago. It’s a one-party town, and while the local Republican leaders have thrown tax incentives at plastic manufacturers, for instance, the new jobs are nowhere near numerous enough to replace those that are gone. The city (?) is now smaller than my hometown in New Jersey. This article about Martinsville is a year old, but the depressing fallout from it is going to make my computer sob for at least another few months.
What killed me about Martinsville, what still kills me about it, is not that it’s culturally the opposite of what I like, or where I would want to live. Nor is it the crappy food, the embrace of dim macho politics and desperate, full-body embrace of a sport I absolutely cannot fathom. I mean, there’s that, and that is something, and I acknowledge that it’s clearly shaping my view of the place (city? town?). But mostly it’s just that I can’t think of a way out for Martinsville. I don’t have a special genius for urban planning, but what’s left there – an under-educated populace that spent generations perfecting trades that effectively no longer exist, a parade of unhelpful politicians at the state and local levels, a culture of surly defiance that’s everywhere on display – seems unworkable. I don’t know a way out other than the route I took, down VA 220 to the interstate and then on to the Piedmont Triad Airport in Greensboro.
Culturally, politically, in the very fabric of the place, Martinsville seems to have worked as if there were only one way to do things: Trust a higher power, Jesus or the furniture manufacturer or Dale Earnhart Sr. and keep on plugging. And that one way does not, has not, will not work. I was happy to leave, but sad at what I was leaving behind. Martinsville didn’t exactly seem like a nice place, but the people there — my friend’s new in-laws and the people working at the hotel and the few retail places I visited – deserve better. It’s not hard to see how they wound up with their lot. But I found it hard to look their present in the face all the same, and sobering to consider their future.
Also, here’s a promise from me to you, dear reader – every single thing I ever write for this site will be more uplifting than this. You have my word. I don’t really think I could possibly break it, honestly. – David Roth
D.R. – an interesting piece, but what is interesting in my mind is the juxtaposition of Martinsville and say any town in a 3rd world country. Prospects come and go, fortunes and futures are won and lost. But the people survive. They are people of that place and, often, are people of an earlier if not better time. The people of the US need to come to terms with the Martinsvilles, the Plainville, KS, and other places as our own. On a bright note, maybe once again we will build diversity out of a world forever trying to homogenize itself. Good Work.
I am going to assume that the wedding you went to wasn’t at the racetrack, but did you see any going on there while you were around? I can only imagine that that would be the pinnacle of venue ‘gets’ for virgina male nascar fans.