“Hey Mitchum, I think there’s a guy fuckin’ your mule out by the pike.”
The hulking broad expanse of the proprietor’s frame twisted, the bristles of stubble lining his thick neck rustling roughly across the underside of his jaw as he looked up and over his shoulder, his focus turning from his work at the honey-hued chopping block behind the counter to meet the eyes of the messenger.
“Ain’t nobody doin’ nothing to Chocolat,” Mitchum grumbled, wiping his hands with a length of threadbare paisley he produced from the pocket of his coveralls. The delicate French chocolat, the last two letters curling up into vapor, fading away before they’d been articulated, stood in stark relief to the gravelly clang of Mitchum’s deep mountain bur.
“Naw, Mitchum, I seen ‘em,” the customer protested. “He’s-“
“Aw, Puck, it’s just Gaynor Byrd out there, puttin’ on a show for the tourists.” Mitchum had already turned his attention back to the candied jerky he was wrapping in squares of beeswax paper.
“Tur’sts?!” Puck spat. A jetstream of Nan’s homebrewed root beer arced from the gangly old man’s guffawing lips and splattered across the warped hardwood of the counter.
Annoyed, Mitchum jerked his chin toward the leaded glass window at the front of the shop. There, in the distance, across the rolling paddock freckled with hay bales, was Gaynor, one arm outstretched, holding his straw hat aloft as if in celebration, the other buried in the gray-brown fur of Chocolat’s back as he gyrated his pelvis theatrically. Beyond him, just on the other side of the weathered split rail fence, a steady trickle of glossy black cars with opaque black windows glided past, almost imperceptibly slowing as they came around a curve in the pike, and upon Gaynor, then ever so slightly accelerating away, winding their way up the one-lane, packed dirt whispering like TV static beneath their tires, hugging the inside of the lane against the mountainside. By now, Gaynor had replaced his hat on his head, and held a crooked middle finger aloft at the caravan, whooping as he did. The unhooked brass clasps of his coveralls whipped around him with each thrust, banging against one another in an erratic din.
“No tur’sts come up hea,” Puck went on, ignoring the sticky puddle Mitchum had begun to wipe up with a damp grayed rag. He pushed away the shop cat, a haggard old orange tom, who had begun lapping up the spray. “Nothin’ up any further on the pike than the ol’ ‘piscopalian church, besides.”
Mitchum grunted his assent.
“Awwww shit,” slowly, Puck seemed to assemble the jigsaw pieces.
“Yer man ain’t play-fuckin’ a mule for no tur’sts.” His words came fast now, tinged with disbelief. “’Das a funeral!”
—
Jonjo Byrd III hails from Holler Hollow, West Virginia, the profile in Rolling Stone began, but he doesn’t wanna talk about it.
As these things tend to do, the newest face of Calvin Klein and erstwhile muse of Donatella Versace’s willingness to discuss absolutely anything- from his paternity suit, to that James van der Beek feud, to the infamous Jersey City DUI- excepting the place that made him made us all the curiouser and curiouser about the remote West Virginia outpost. So, we traveled there (sans Jonjo, of course) to find out for ourselves: what’s eating Jonjo Byrd III?
—
Emery Pike cut such a steep grade up the mountain that even the graveyard behind Holler Hollow Episcopalian Church sloped upwards, the dead eternally balancing on the precipice of a rollercoaster. The last of the town Episcopalians had died in 1993, and the property had fallen into ironic purgatory. A delegation from the General Convention petitioned the town to preserve the church as a local historic landmark, but the Holler Hollow Council had declined.
The church itself was little more than an off-white clapboard box with a tin steeple pockmarked by dimples from hailstorms; the cross itself hung limply from its peak, dangling by a few tenuous threads of oxidized metal. Black grime from years in the backwoods stretched down in inky waves from the roof toward the raw pine shutters, and clawing its way up from the foundation was a wash of loamy, rust-colored clay. Stalactites, stalagmites.
Jonjo’s manager was content to have him interred in Hollywood Forever and not fuss with transporting his remains across state lines and back home, but his mother, his only living relative, save for the bastard son of Gabrielle Moreau, who, true to her name, had positively vivisected him in the child support hearing, insisted he come home.
“Did you drive here?” A wispy tendril of a man with glazed skin and a tight grimace asked, his gaze fixed on the New York license plate of a candy-shell black car. A leggy, bored-looking woman with heavy eyelids sneered in response as she heaved herself to her feet and out of the car with great effort.
“Do you know how far away the closest airport is? Edgar said it would be just as well to drive, if you can believe it.”
“Absolute barbarism.”
“Savagery,” she agreed.
—
Holler Hollow (“Bumfuck, West Virginia,” Jonjo calls it) is populated by 412 of the exact sort you’d imagine. Both “holler” (in Appalachia) and “hollow” (everywhere else) refer to a small valley nestled among the mountains, often with a creek or stream running through it, so it’s apropos that the locals don’t pronounce the words as distinctly different; “Holler Holler” is the correct pronunciation, and to call it otherwise will immediately identify you as an interloper- although, to be fair, everybody knows everybody, so chances are word has spread through the holler that there’s a new face in town long before you’ve had occasion to call it by name.
—
The air smelled heavy, sooty, and a peculiar gray fluff circulated on the strong breeze that left the mourners’ hair lashing their faces. There were no more than a dozen gathered, split down the middle between uptown types in tailored shift dresses and sleek blowouts, and denim-clad townies with leathery skin and graying stubble. The former clustered together, hesitant to engage the latter.
“You see that guy screwin’ the donkey on the way up here?” A man with a strong Boston accent asked, obviously affronted at the scene.
From behind their huddle, Jonjo’s uncle, the smell of Budweiser on his lips, lifted a finger helpfully. “That there’s a mule,” he supplied. “And ‘round these parts, we call it makin’ love.” He and another, nearly identical man with great beefy jowls and a hand missing the better part of its index finger, erupted into raucous laughter. The man from Boston flushed a deep scarlet, and, with great effort, arranged his features to look even more solemn.
Jonjo’s uncle clapped a meaty hand on his back. “Aw, lighten up, it’s just a funeral!” With that, he and his twin dissolved into howls again.
An older woman in ill-fitting jeans, with unnaturally red hair and a lit Marlboro hanging from her bottom lip, cut her eyes at the pair before she clapped her hands. “Might better get on with it ‘fore the law gets wind,” she said gruffly, and stepped toward the precariously tilting coffin resting on the overgrown November grass at the edge of the cemetery.
“That’s his mother,” the curlicue man whispered, and his companion gasped.
Jonjo’s mother looked like a leaky pool float: candy-colored, but withering. You could almost see the life leaking out of her, air escaping through a pinhole, something fragile that had been played with too roughly. Her collarbones and sternum jutted out beneath her tank top. As a boy, Jonjo’s best friend Phil had said that she reminded him of origami, all sharp creases and crisp edges, like she’d been shrink-wrapped inside her own skin.
“Poor thing, she looks positively unwell.”
“Oh honey, that’s not grief. That’s the meth.”
The two of them suppressed a snigger as the woman stamped her cigarette out.
—
It’s a town full of banks (six, for those keeping score at home), but no money. I counted nearly a dozen churches, and to hear Jonjo’s mother Dorit Naier Byrd tell it, the same parallel rings true on that count as well.
“Folks around here’s just durn’ the best they can,” Dorit says benignly, “but between you and me, they all need a little more Jesus.”
We’re parked on her front porch in what she calls the “industrial sector” of town, near the (decommissioned) mine, drinking Diet Pepsi out of repurposed Smuckers jars. Behind us, the house that Jonjo grew up in sits largely unchanged, save for a new aluminum roof.
“Salesman come out here all the way from Morgantown tryna’ sell me a standing seam roof, an’ I kept telling him this ain’t the Biltmore and we just need a reg’lar ol’ sheet ‘luminum roof, so I’s standing right here on this porch, and he was down on the walk right ‘chea, we was talkin’ about it, and he’s wavin’ around this steel sample, an’ it’s a little bit dark, but the weather’s good enough. Then, outta nowhere, big ass bolt of lightnin’ hits that steel, goes right through ‘im! But that wasn’t what done it- he was staggerin’ around in the yard, alive though, and tried to steady himself on the fence-” she gestures to a dubiously engineered cinder block wall on the periphery of the yard, notably missing its middle section- “an’ I yelled out, ‘We ain’t mortared that up yet, friend!’ But it toppled right down on ‘im and he died right there in the rhododendron. Ruint my fence too. That sumbitch was ‘sposed to keep the deers out the muscadines. Did get a free roof outta the whole shebang though. God rest his soul.” Dorit takes a satisfied sip of her Diet Pepsi, though from my vantage point of the rhododendron I seem to have lost my taste for it.
Storytelling comes naturally to natives of this swath of mountains, and it’s hard not to lose yourself in Dorit’s tales, horrifying as they may be. And there are more! People, she tells me, tend to find creative ways to die in small towns. Like the local pastor who drowned in a culvert but was definitely not drunk. Or the town councilman whose widow swears he died of Chronic Wasting Disease, which generally affects deer, and has little possibility of ever infecting humans, but rots its victims from the inside out, until their innards are but black sludge and they starve to death, or else go mad.
She doesn’t mention her late daughter, Dorcas Byrd, whose death at the hands of her son’s father garnered headlines, as it saw Jonjo choose to move forward with attending People’s Sexiest Man Alive gala the same night, despite the personal tragedy- and I don’t ask.
When I broach the subject with Jonjo weeks later, he sniffles and looks down at his hands as he declares, “Domestic violence is a terrible thing. It’s an epidemic and we have to raise awareness to stop it.”
When I bring up the several 911 calls from Gabrielle Moreau’s Park Avenue penthouse just weeks later, in which he was accused of domestic violence himself, he waves the question away. “It’s a bit more nuanced than all that, Gabrielle and my thing. It’s easy to listen to the tape and call it domestic violence, but there’s a big –huge!- difference between what happened with she and I and what happened to my sister.”
(When reached for comment, the representative for Ms. Moreau, who currently has a protective order in place against Jonjo, agreed, saying simply: “There is. Dorcas Byrd died.”)
I ask Dorit if she is relieved, then, that Jonjo seems to have escaped the holler and the grotesque, almost comical ends its inhabitants seem to find, but she just stirs her drink with a red and white striped straw and takes another sip of Diet Pepsi.
“More’n one way to skin a cat,” she replies, and I’m fairly sure she’s misunderstood the question.
—
A roughly hewn grave, absent the smooth dirt edges and shiny casket lowering devices of more formal burials, was to be Jonjo’s final resting place. At the edge of the cemetery, the slope was steeper, and Dorit’s mud-streaked tennis shoes struggled to find purchase as she, along with a handful of cousins, hauled the simple pine casket behind them, like a team of sled dogs, toward the site.
“I didn’t know Jonjo was Episcopalian,” one of the out-of-towners remarked idly.
“He weren’t!” Dorit called out as she looped coils of rope around her forearm and waist, as if in preparation to belay the coffin down herself. “But when there’s a perfectly good plot fallen into disuse up here overlookin’ the holler would go to waste otherwise..well that’s just economical.”
A grunt arose from the pallbearers as they strained against the rope rigging they’d constructed, and, to the horror of half the assemblage, began to haphazardly lower the chest into the ground.
“Wait,” Jonjo’s manager gasped, eyes bulging when the casket landed with a thud inside the grave, and two of his relations high-fived, “is this, like, a guerilla funeral?”
Dorit smiled warmly, then turned her attention to the groaning John Deere, shrouded in black trash bags- “Out of respect and for camo,” the grizzled man in the bucket seat beamed- that had begun shoveling bucketfuls of earth into the hole.
“Jonjo didn’t much care for Holler Holler, if you believed the magazines,” she addressed the crowd, “but we’re grateful to have him home all the same. And we are grateful to the Episcopalians for dyin’ out ‘fore they used up all the good plots.”
—
Back inside, Dorit sits me down at her heavy honey oak table- the clunky faux early-American pedestal sort that populated every Nana’s house in the 90s. The kitchen is cluttered in a homey way, and it’s easy to imagine it bustling with the legion of relatives that live within “spitting distance”, as Dorit puts it.
On the windowsill, a dead fly is perched, perfectly intact, wings just slightly raised, as if ready to take flight the moment the leaded glass pane is raised. But it’s late October, too cool on the mountain for open-air cooking surely, and besides, it’s long dead, its little bottle-brush legs terminating in slight black feet stuck hopelessly to the amber goop of a glue trap.
A parchment-colored refrigerator, probably white in an earlier lifetime, is plastered top to bottom with snapshots of grinning nieces and nephews, thin magazine clippings featuring recipe names like “Crockpot Crack Possum Pot Pie”, and school portraits of Jonjo and Dorcas, inexplicably featuring laser beam light show backdrops. When I notice a large collage, the pre-made drag-and-drop kind emblazoned with the words “Byrd Family Reunion 2020”, I try not to let my eyes linger on a shot of Dorit, one arm draped casually around Gabrielle Moreau, a chubby baby with ruddy cheeks and a “Grandnan’s Best Fran” onesie clutched tight against her cheek in the other.
While she cuts a healthy serving of pecan pie, I ask Dorit why there are no recent photos of Jonjo on the fridge- his ad from Times Square, perhaps? I’m taken aback when, instead of the matter-of-fact candor clothed in bright levity I’ve come to expect from her, she trains her eyes on the linoleum for a moment, and with heartbreaking earnestness, tells me, “Well, because I don’t know that person. He calls from time to time, sure, but I ain’t seen’m in ten years now.”
There’s a surprising impulse (one which this reporter has never encountered before or since) to turn off my voice recorder, but she waves me off when she sees me reach for it.
“I know what he says- er don’t say- ‘bout folks on the mountain. How he needs to not be us so he can be Jonjo Byrd III-” her voice drops as she says his name, mimicking the entertainment talking heads that trumpet the latest soundbites and scandals surrounding her son- “but maybe it’ll pass. Maybe one day he’ll come home, and I’ll have a new picture put up there.”
There’s a pause. Dorit follows my gaze back to the photo on the fridge and stiffens.
“And that’s all I’ve got to say about that.”
—
“Pour one out for Jonny!” A rotund relative in a Stone Cold Steve Austin t-shirt demanded, and, as if by magic, all his ilk produced various silvery cans from their coveralls and flannels.
Dorit smiled again, and her long red fingernails clacked against the aluminum of a Diet Pepsi as she cracked the tab and took a sip of the frothing bubbles before turning it upside down, the syrupy brown liquid cascading to the freshly packed dirt, where it splashed up onto her jeans.
—
If you could alchemize the notes of a mountain dulcimer into a human voice, that would be Dorit’s: less twangy than a banjo, but slightly richer, sweeter. Both her voice and her visage call to mind a less garish Dolly Parton. By comparison, Jonjo’s proudly non-regional accent feels jarring; an audible manifestation of the distance he’s put between himself and his roots, despite the fact that it was his broad-faced, soft-jawed, gritty, and slightly-haunted child-miner vibe that rocketed him to prominence at seventeen in the first place, endearing him to the likes of Victoria Beckham and Ralph Lauren. When I ask after his accent, he takes a swig of Perrier, swishes it around, then spits it out into the rocky landscaping of his Joshua Tree retreat.
“I got rid of it,” he says simply, as if explaining he’d rehomed a puppy that wasn’t the right fit. “Accents like that…make you sound simple. Uneducated. You know?”
—
“Y’all come on back to the house and have some refreshments,” Dorit called as the crowd dispersed.
Universally, the contingent of sophisticates declined this invitation with wan smiles and a quick word of condolence, before climbing back into their cars to begin the hike back to their waiting jets and far-flung metros.
“That was it?” Hairdresser to the stars, Louetta Hamm, moon-eyed in her mud-caked Louboutins, asked.
“And not a moment too soon!” crowed the curlicue man, flippant even as he crossed himself. Then he assumed a dour face, lips pursed, chin tilted up just so to catch the light. With the freshly turned earth of Jonjo’s grave in the background, his thumb mashed the shutter button for a selfie, and scrolled with deft fingers to superimpose crying face emoji, praying hands emoji, headstone emoji on top of the photo.
“Aaaand post,” he concluded nasally, before, “Kill me. No service, of course.”
Louetta pulled a face of disapproval. “Don’t be tacky, Jean,” she chastised.
“You don’t be tacky,” he shot back, as she closed the door of her G-Wagon behind her. “Waify bitch,” he muttered.
—
Jonjo is infamously, almost aggressively tight-lipped about most aspects of his life before he found celebrity. The bits of biographic detail that populate bar trivia nights have been eked out over the years, a slow leak of nearly accidental factoids he’s let slip or that can be gleaned from an afternoon spent in the basement of the Tri-County Municipal Library just outside of town. There’s a cornucopia of ephemera to be sorted through there, although it’s mostly immaterial to getting to the heart of who he is. There’s a 1991 Sunday edition of the Holler Hollow Holler, more a newsletter than a newspaper, that touts the success of his tee-ball team at the regional tournament, featuring a group photo in which the gap-toothed, dirt-smudged face of a five-year old Jonjo is nearly impossible to single out from among the dozen other boys. An archival copy of the program from Dorcas’s services at the Double H Funeral Home, Crematorium and Casket Emporium lists him as a surviving sibling, and notes she was preceded in death by her father. A yearbook from his high school features a smirking, cross-armed Jonjo standing back to back with a Justin Timberlake-lookalike in a leather jacket, their sophomore class elective emblazoned beneath the photo: Biggest Mama’s Boys.
For their part, the locals remain steadfast in their dutiful indifference to the meteoric and global success of Holler Hollow’s favorite son. I ask the attendant at the only petrol station in town about him. “Jonjo? We’s classmates from pre-k all the way up to 10th grade.”
I ask how he feels about Jonjo’s success.
“Dunno much about it. I know he dropped out and went out west when that yankee come up here, I was kindly green about that- chemistry class and whatnot.” He exhales a long, low whistle. “Folks say he’s on billboards and such, so good on ‘im. Feel kinda bad for ‘im though.”
Incredulous, I glance around at the station: two rusted pumps, neither with a credit card reader.
The attendant shrugs. “I ain’t gotta sing for my supper,” he says simply.
—
There’s an author’s note, bracketed italics plunked down at the bottom of the first page, cattywampus to a black-and-white portrait of Jonjo, brooding, his chin lifted toward the light to offset the genetic softness of his jaw, a flaw that he’d combatted with fillers and bucchal fat removal and cool sculpting, but that dogged him relentlessly nonetheless, an unassailable link tethering him to the West Virginia Byrds, which made him hate it all the more.
[Provided an advance copy of this article, as predicated by our agreement, Eli Lamb, Ionjo’s longtime manager, returned it with a sigh. “It’s true in the big ways, I suppose. It’s about Jonjo, but it’s really about Dorit. It always is.”]
—
Dorit and I meander through the industrial sector on the rear-facing bench of her brother Juthro’s side-by-side just at sunset. She points her long nails (“Press-ons from Family Dollar’s,” she confides) at landmarks rendered precious by their connection to Jonjo, what seems like a lifetime ago.
“He musta been- what’d you say, Juthro, about eight? Maybe eight, we’s celebrating the New Year right there in that lot, on account of you could see the fireworks show from Threeway through the ridge there, and Jonjo lit off this M-80. You’d never seen such a thing! Whole field went up like kindling, volunteer fire department had to come spray it down, and got us uninvited to the New Year’s Day potluck at the VFW.”
Eventually, as darkness descends on Holler Hollow and Juthro flicks on the headlights of the UTV, he passes a frosty can of Natural Light back to me, and I nurse it anxiously, while Googling open container laws in West Virginia (for the uninitiated, they are strict).
“None for you?” I ask Dorit, and she quickly declines. “Jesus tells me not to be drunk with wine or Coors,” she coos. “My Diet Pepsi’s my only vice.”
—
Mitchum glanced up from the canister of boiled linseed oil he was considering just in time to watch the cavalcade of black cars and, inexplicably, a trash bag-covered tractor, inch their way back down the mountain. Gaynor, exhausted from his performance, was perched on a vinyl barstool, his back to the counter, watching. He spat a sunflower seed onto the checkerboard tile, and Mitchum sighed heavily, but remained silent.
Puck, for his part, did not.
“That was fast,” he said, and was met with quiet. “Didn’t know they still did funerals at the ‘piscopalian churchyard.”
“They don’t,” Gaynor answered. The two parallel grooves between his eyebrows, framing the bridge of his nose, deepened as he chewed the inside of his cheek. “Should call Bobby Higgins ‘bout that. Improper disposal’s a misdemeanor, don’t ask me how I know.”
“Naw, Gaynor, let that boy rest in peace,” Mitchum chided.
“Who’s it?” Puck demanded.
“’Sides, it ain’t improper. It is a cemetery.”
“It’s thievin’,” Gaynor insisted.
“Thievin’ from who? Dead Episcopalians?” Mitchum answered. “They ain’t usin’ that yard anymore.”
“What’s got you so tore up?” Puck asked, and again, silence settled thick in the room. Gaynor screwed up his face into a scowl, muttering about sell-outs and traitors.
Mitchum squinted at the fat globules of rain that had begun to splatter the window in earnest, the late afternoon sun shot through with the full color spectrum through the prism of each sloppy drop. “Devil’s beatin’ his wife again,” he muttered.
Gaynor scoffed bitterly. “Devil? There’s your proof Jonjo Byrd III has arrived. Cold day in hell, indeed!”
—
“D’you know Dave [Duchovny]?” Jonjo asks, as we settle around the fire pit back in Joshua Tree. “He lives just over that way, on the other side of this property. And Hasselhoff, he’s on the other side. Letterman just bought the little bungalow to the south. Three Daves and a Byrd in the Tree, Dave [unsure] calls us!”
I compliment his property- it seems that this is what he’s waiting for, after all- and he nods affirmingly. “My oasis away from the city,” he says, though he doesn’t say which city; he’s got a penthouse in Manhattan, a humble-enough ranch in Calabasas, and a condo in Tahoe.
“All the properties in Joshua Tree are gravel. Gravel xeriscaping, gravel driveways, gravel access roads. Gravel just screams poverty to me.” I purse my lips, remembering the crunch of the gravel roads of Holler Hollow beneath my feet, unsettled over the guilt I feel sitting there. “So I trucked in something like twenty tons of cement to pave every walkway and road leading here. Took like a year and a half to get all the permits.”
Jonjo is wearing furry black pants (“next season’s Moschino,” he whispers conspiratorially, and winks). He swills a Diet Pepsi now and I tell him it reminds me of his mother. His grin is brief, almost pained. “Tastes like fizzy battery acid,” he tells me. “But I just can’t give it up.”
This seems like as good a moment as any, so I ask if he thinks he’ll ever go home to Holler Hollow, when all this is over.
“Bunch ‘a mule-fuckers,” he spits, and I’m taken aback by the fury of it. His non-regional accent is fraying at the edges, and I hear the most threadbare hint of the mountains coloring his voice. “Be a cold day in hell, Sam. I’ll go back to Holler Holler over my dead body.”
At that, Jonjo decides to call it a night. I watch him lope back toward the bungalow, can of Diet Pepsi forgotten by the fire, arms spread wide in exasperation. His shadow lengthens, climbing the adobe façade of the house, the mohair of his pants crackling around his silhouette like static. From where I sit, Jonjo Byrd III looks peculiarly like a housefly.
Danielle Barr is a full time stay-at-home mom and writer. She was the winner of the Driftwood Press annual short story contest, and her works have appeared or are forthcoming in The Milk House, Okay Donkey, HAD, and others, while her novels have been shortlisted for the Regal House Publishing Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction, the Unleash Press WIP Prize, and others. Danielle lives in rural Appalachia with her husband and four young children.
