Back in the early 80s, there was a lower economic area of Buckhead that began to eat itself in the hopes of attaining glory. We lived in the area right before it began to chow down. The name of the apartment “complex” may have been Oak Hill. My husband thinks it may have been Oak Hill. I don’t have a clue. And he’s not certain because that isn’t how it was known. Its common name was “Viet Cong Villa”. The buildings were dark red brick, each consisting of, if I remember correctly, 4 to 6 townhome type apartments (upstairs and down), either two or three bedrooms, probably built in the 40s. The Emory family-student housing complex was in the same style, the one they tore down and replaced around the time of the Olympics.
The name “Viet Cong Villa” should clue in as to the neighborhood. I don’t know why but a large number of Vietnamese families had settled in the complex. Extended families of cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents. There was also a significant-sized “hispanic” community and a number of other nationalities. In our little cul-de-sac we were the only household with English as the primary language. The two apartments on our left were Vietnamese. The one on our right was Hispanic. The next building was all Vietnamese with the exception of one German family. The complex was probably close to 90 percent Vietnamese and Hispanic.
Between 1975 and 1984 about 8000 Vietnamese arrived in Georgia as refugees, poor, bewildered, struggling to cope with new culture. One set of my grandparents lived in southwestern Missouri and a number of Vietnamese had landed there as well, not quite so easy to overlook, seeming like a wayward flock of birds blown off course by a storm, about as inobvious as if if you were watching Shirley Jones and Robert Preston in “Music Man” and suddenly there was this group of Vietnamese extras in the background who you could swear weren’t within two worlds of the parade your last viewing. But there are a lot more buildings in Atlanta where the roads snake around and about instead of squaring off in neat orderly blocks, and those faces disappeared into the fringes in the midst of the city, hidden in the nicks and tucks of those roads, such as at Oak Hill, the entrance to which was deftly hidden in plain view at a stop light at an imposing RR trestle that served as a gate to Piedmont Road’s ascendance into Buckhead. Most people we knew or know never realized the apartment complex even existed.
The apartments, as far as I was concerned, were quite nice. Walk in and there were the stairs to the second-floor and then a decent-sized open living/dining room area. The kitchen was to the rear, had a stove/oven and refrigerator that worked and also a small pantry for storage. Upstairs was the bath and the bedrooms. Some of the walls were plaster and some sheet rock, and as there was more plaster than sheet rock the apartment had that solid feel persevering feel that comes with plaster. The windowsills were deep, the center windows large, and the side windows all opened with a hand crank. The flooring downstairs was a godawful but tolerable vinyl. The upstairs flooring was real wood. The bath was old tile. The stairs were so worn that I fell down them, from the top all the way to the bottom, several times. Always, I landed in a frightfully contorted heap with half my body stretching up the front door and my husband would come running in thinking I’d broken my neck. Each time I fell I happened to be carrying a cup of hot coffee or tea, and each time I remember thinking I didn’t want to spill that hot coffee or tea all over me. And never once, falling down those steps, did I spill a drop. As I fell down the steps I always somehow managed to set down my cup.
Without speaking a word to each other, only nodding, it still managed to be a friendly cul-de-sac. Except for the teen-age hopeful drummers who practiced in the afternoons, it was surprisingly quiet. One may wonder how we ended up scarcely speaking a word to the neighbors, only nodding, but that’s the way it was, and one never heard English spoken. If you heard anyone speaking English outside it was so unusual you’d go look to see what was going on. We were usually on the road but I don’t think it would have been different had we lived there full-time.
I have no idea who the owners were. Management was a single white guy who lived in one of the front buildings. If you lodged a complaint, nothing ever went unattended for more than a day or two.
The apartments lined several tree-lined streets that were widely spaced. There were no back porches or private yards. Instead there was a large, sprawling communal area out the back doors. It was a grassy little valley where there were no trees, the grass always well-tended, not muddy. A basketball hoop where the teenage boys played was behind our apartment, and there was a small childrens’ play area in another part of the complex.
One day one of the apartments back behind us, across that little valley, put up a small enclosed back porch area. Cheap screening with a rippled green fiberglass roof and a cheap screen door. Within a month it seemed nearly every other apartment had put up the same style back porch area and then everyone had small bar-b-ques that they cooked on and sat outside early evenings during the summer months.
The apartments were warm in the winter but were beastly hot in the summer. There was no built-in AC and few had window units. We didn’t. No one else in our cul-de-sac did. This was the early 80s and most left their apartment doors open all night during the summer. I remember more than once, the upstairs an oven, seeking some relief from the heat by sleeping on the linoleum floor downstairs. It seemed just plain crazy that in the middle of Atlanta you could leave your front door wide open all night without anyone seeing that as an invitation to walk off with all your belongings, but we were shortly leaving our door open as well.
One time we returned after a couple of weeks on the road to find that our back door had been open the entire time. One of us had forgotten to lock it and a cat had gained entrance. A white cat. Shed a lot of white fur all over the furniture and the bed but that was it. It was the only place we lived in where we never had a break-in or anyone stealing anything from outside. The only trouble we did personally have was once we came back after a week out, 4 or 5 am, were happy as we’d finally saved enough money to get our car fixed, were looking forward to getting it running again, we went to bed and next thing we knew the police were visiting outside, all the cars vandalized, headlights smashed, tires slashed. We didn’t have the money to fix the car plus buy tires.
Before we moved out there had begun to be talk of gangs and there were two more predawn incidents in the parking lot, gunfire finally, blue police lights filling the upstairs front bedroom. An air conditioning unit immediately appeared in the upstairs of an apartment across the street. People began closing their doors. I don’t know where we first heard about gangs moving in. Some things you remember like that and others it seems like one day you know, you breathe in and there’s news in the air which becomes knowledge that seems a priori, no questioning how you ever came to know as it was as natural as breathing. I do remember that no one was talking about Vietnamese gangs yet in Atlanta. The night of the last incident, I was dreaming that I had entered the front upstairs bedroom and looked down to see myself dancing in the street in blue-green light. Which is when I woke up and went into the front bedroom, blue light playing on the white walls, and stood a long while looking down at the police cars.
The strip mall next door (across an access to Buford Highway) had stores and restaurants that served the different communities. The theater had been one of the few in Atlanta that showed alternative films back then. On the weekends and late nights they showed martial arts films, not dubbed. The lines were long.
On the other side of the strip mall was another apartment complex, newer, early 70s vintage, already sagging, that was almost entirely Hispanic. A couple of blocks down a side street one started to get into the sex district. Across the road from our complex was Atlanta’s one Church of Scientology. An odd building that was part house. When they moved out a kindergarten center took it over and stapled on a pink tower so everyone would know there were children there.
I didn’t feel a very good neighbor around the Vietnamese families. I was staggering a lot around there, and when I went out to walk the dog and couldn’t walk I felt rather obvious. Indeed, it was so quiet there (to me) and I felt so obvious that the clanking of the bottles I tossed into the dempsey dumpster late at night unnerved me. I didn’t want the neighbors with their families of children and grandparents to hear them. So one night at around three am I found myself sensibly digging a hole in the garden under a neighbor’s window where I could bury my bottles in peace. I woke up a bit as I dug and stopped and thought what am I doing because I couldn’t remember, and then I remembered and I thought to myself y’know this isn’t exactly normal. I was off the road by then and was supposedly, hopefully trying to stop doing this kind of thing. Having already been hospitalized and kicked out after smuggling in alcohol and drinking on Antabuse (goodbye, you’re hopeless, we’re not going to be responsible) I figured I’d be dead in a couple of months.
I was, I felt, a sensible insensible drinker. With my hair cropped close to my head and my leather cap and jacket I felt I was less noticeable playing tag with the cars on the highway as I made my way across from the liquor store. A woman with long hair I thought now that would be a stand out in the sun obvious bit of staggering news crossing the highway. But not me. I thought I was considerate, forgoing my authentic stiletto 60s heels for tennis shoes because I was aware I wasn’t too steady on my feet and didn’t want anyone having to rake me up off the road.
I read horrifying things about Vietnam during those years. Things I’d not heard before, some things I’ve not read published since. I’d known Vietnam Veterans but none had ever talked about the war. I had known about My Lai. It was big news in Georgia as Calley was from Georgia. But for all the media coverage, the photos, one still never read in graphic terms the one-on-one American against Vietnamese violence, and though I took for granted a lot there were things I read that would never have occurred to me. It had only been five or six years since, in high school, I’d watched on the news the chaos of the evacuation of Saigon. Desperate crowds you know are composed of desperate individuals but the camera never settles long or close enough to get too personal.
The early 80s had its own set of horrors that sank to the bottom of America’s media pit where news is news for an instant then gone. Bits and pieces were little knife points sticking up through the newsprint from Central and South American that John Travolta and disco balls and the shrieking sopranos of the BeeGees kept converting into part of the splintered, sparkly bedazzle along with Reagan smiling smiling and George H. W. Bush. Reading between the lines would sometimes eventually coalesce into a more detailed story in alternative publications. I read up on fascism as best as I could, going through the libraries, carrying armloads of books with me on the road. For some reason there didn’t seem a lot available in Atlanta, or not as much as I wanted, and here I was forgetting and leaving books at motels.
In 1981 “Mad Max” was released in America, the same year Negroponte was appointedAmbassador to Honduras.
J. Emmett Winn writes in “Mad Max, Reaganism and the Road Warrior”:
These films entered the US during a period of renewed nationalistic interest and conservatism linked with the Reagan/Bush administrations… The Road Warrior was very successful in the US at a time when Reaganism touted the need to “right” the social order and build a conservative nationalism that could thwart the supposed threat posed by multiculturalism. Simultaneously, it provided the violent white male hero of Western mythology who would rid the hegemonic “space” of the “deviants” threatening the dominant elite
I don’t recollect the first time I saw “Mad Max” but I was likely not all there and just got the feeling of grit in my teeth. The second time would not have been too long later and I remember watching and thinking, “Oh, uh, this doesn’t seem to be what I thought it might have been,” though I couldn’t much remember what I thought it might have been. The first time, there’d just been a sense of punk rage blowing in off the desert and it got high marks for not being disco. Almost everything was damn disco or an exercise video dressed up to look like something else and “Mad Max” wasn’t that.
I read on the internet an individual being mystified at the supposed punk cult following that Mad Max had. But I don’t know that Mad Max had really a punk following.
One felt like one was living in a desert wasteland. And having grown up partly in the desert, and loving the desert, I mean the cultural and political waste of the time. If you came out of the 70s there was the sense your older brother and sister hippies had gone and left you in the lurch. By the time you were out of high school social and political consciousness seemed to be eaten up by coke. The future had been ripped out from under one, squandered by this seeming collapse into no-holds-barred greed and a terrifying disregard for a crumbling environment. I remember 1980 very clearly and one felt assaulted, one felt raped by the Reaganites and what they were preparing to do, felt raped and assaulted already because you knew their plans and how they had no boundaries. A detached clip of Mad Max seemed to capture the futility and rage of that abandonment to merciless sneering power but as you sat and watched it became clear the brief clip and the whole book had nothing to do with each other. Mad Max turned down being a hero, disappearing into the desert, but he was no punk, and the villains were being sold as punk, and all that was left was an insane vigilante justice that felt like conservatism out for a long-running, gory, good old time. What the general public, the college boys, the fashion punks saw and identified as raw, as punk, wasn’t Patti Smith, Television, the Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop. What they whooped and hollered over was anger dissociated from despair, becoming a violence fetish instead and a reaffirmation of what I would call the Death Culture of the Reaganites and Bushites. Appearance over substance. Meaning beaten to a black and blue pulp, trussed up in fashion handcuffs and sold as something other than what it is. By the late 80s the alternative paper here was running fashion pieces with models featuring bruised eyes and legs as desirable, coquettish, apparently perceiving no conflict with occasional stories on violence against women, which I don’t think is another story but is part of the continuum.
The fetishism of violence seems to me always to do with subversion and denial of despair.
On 6 March 1978 Larry Flynt was paralyzed during an assassination attempt. On 27 Nov 1978 the Mayor of San Francisco and Harvey Milk had been assassinated. On December 8, 1980 Chapman murdered Lennon. On Oct 6 1981 Anwar Sadat, the President of Egypt, was assassinated. On March 30 1981 there was the assassination bid on Reagan that missed his heart and got Press Secretary Jim Brady’s head. On May 13 1981 there was an assassination bid on the pope. It wasn’t exactly the most settled of times. Conservative, nihilistic, Hollywood gold punk gunk came crawling out of the confusion with Reagan at the helm, waving like a beauty queen and there was nothing ironic about it that rapture ecstasies trumped faith in realism. Yes, I know my view on nihilism isn’t typical. I know that Reagan was billed as the antidote to nihilism. I don’t think what’s regarded normally as nihilism is what it’s purported to be, and is instead realism stomped on and repackaged as unprincipaled sullen joy in doom and gloom. The way I looked on it in the early 80s was if what’s billed as nihilism is unprincipaled and valueless, then Reagan was its muscled mardi gras king. I remember looking out the front window of the “Viet Cong Villa” apartment, it was a sunny day, summer, and Reagan and his grand nihilistic parade constellated in the shimmering ether (I believe this was while I was getting sober), and I don’t know why I was seeing Schwarzenegger as his body-double riding the same float, don’t know what had happened to cause him to be on my mind, but he was there too. The parade was furiously vaporizing the omnipresent drizzle that had darkened the parade route since the hippies and their flowers had vacated it. Annointed in ask-me-no-questions oil, dazzling, the float hunted down every party-pooping pessimistic that shirked the parade route, zapped away their cloud with global warming and careened off, laughing, vindicated followers cheering wildly.
Was the damndest thing I ever saw.
I got sober in 1982 or 1983. I know one is expected to keep a track on that, but I’m not good with remembering numbers and I stopped worrying about the exact date a long while ago. Became just 1982 or 1983. We moved out of Oak Hill or whatever it’s real name was as we’d heard the place was due to be torn down and while moving out came upon stashes of pills and bottles I’d hidden away in stupors as security then forgotten about. The apartment complex was torn out, one part then another. Bulldozed and businesses installed and more and more businesses installed near it, trying to pull the glory aura of Buckhead down down the hill to the RR tracks and beyond. But it all went flat. A high profile strip club, appropriately named the Gold Club, at its peak during the Olympics, kept the area alive for a while. Now the strip club is gone. Scandal took care of it, I guess after it had served its purpose. Some congregation, determined to illustrate how Jesus covers sin with righteousness, made the building their church home, a god club, draping the mirrors with gold fabric. Whatever happened to them I don’t know but they’re gone now. And finally the strip mall is gone. That part of town which had just been different before now looks desolate.
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