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(ARCHIVES) Being Thomas Jefferson: Reenactors impersonate the past, speak to the present

Editor’s Note: This story on Rob Coles’ life as a Thomas Jefferson descendant and impersonator originally ran in C-VILLE Weekly on June 19, 2012. According to his obituary in The Daily Progress, Mr. Coles died peacefully Tuesday.

For a few minutes before he goes on stage, assuming there is a stage, Rob Coles sits quietly by himself and listens to the nervous static of the crowd. He’s dressed in typical 18th century clothing: breeches, a ruffled white shirt and embroidered waistcoat, a heavy greatcoat, and buckled shoes. The introduction will come soon (it’s always the same because the familiar words help get him into character), and Coles will walk onstage and do what he’s done for 36 of his 60 years. Wearing a costume, he’ll pretend to be somebody else. The audience knows he’s not who he pretends to be, obviously, but they’re willing to suspend their disbelief, because he looks like Thomas Jefferson and speaks like Thomas Jefferson and because they want to be entertained. The first five minutes are the most important, and he can feel it, he can feel the moment when they let go and buy into the fantasy. He is Thomas Jefferson, the Founding Father, come from the dead, come back to tell you all. I shall tell you all.

Jefferson impersonator Stephen McDowell pulls up a chair in Court Square during Charlottesville’s living history exhibition in early June. The co-founder and president of The Providence Foundation, “a Christian educational organization whose mission is to train and network leaders to transform their culture for Christ,” McDowell uses his platform to correct what he believes are incorrect assumptions about Jefferson’s religious beliefs. (Photo by John Robinson)

Living history
There is an oft-repeated maxim writ down by the philosopher George Santayana that goes, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Living here you pretty much repeat the past no matter what. Charlottesville is the kind of place where the past is repeated at you, often aggressively, and since this is the 250th anniversary of its founding, the city is trying to make sure that we’re all remembering the past every single day.

Charlottesville loves festivals almost as much as it loves history, so naturally one of the focal points of its 250th celebration was the soon-to-be-annual Virginia Festival of History, culminating June 2-3 in a “living history” weekend that saw Court Square and Lee and Jackson parks turned into educational red-light districts, with historical reenactors of all types hanging out on street corners trying desperately to sell themselves.

Some of the historical figures were famous, some weren’t, but each day climaxed with the reenactment of a famous local battle, Tarleton’s Raid, when, in 1781, British troopers led by General Sir Banastre Tarleton rode into Charlottesville with the hope of capturing the Virginia Legislature, temporarily relocated from Richmond, and Governor Thomas Jefferson. The raid ultimately failed, albeit narrowly, and Jefferson got away, but watching the Colonial Militia fight the British in the red brick streets of modern Charlottesville was a lot of fun—the brightly colored uniforms, the gleeful anachronisms, the frequent and deafening firing of cannons— what’s not to love? But none of those things drew me to the living history weekend.

I went to Court Square on Sunday morning to watch Stephen McDowell, in character as Thomas Jefferson, address a small, mostly college-aged, church group in front of the Albemarle County Courthouse.

“I’ve been a member of the church my whole life,” McDowell, as Jefferson, told his audience. He wore a nicely patterned gold coat, a flowered waistcoat, and red breeches, and he delivered what amounted to a sermon enumerating the many ways in which Jefferson (himself) was a devout follower of Jesus Christ and the Holy Bible, the foundations upon which, McDowell (as Jefferson) said, he and his fellow Founding Fathers had built America.
“It is not my belief that we need to separate religious principles from daily life,” McDowell said. “The sacred cause of liberty is the cause of God.”

I glanced around as he spoke, watching as everyone but me bowed their heads in prayer. Nobody seemed remotely surprised or outraged, which I found surprising and somewhat outrageous. This was not the Jefferson I’d grown up with.

Stephen McDowell lives here in Charlottesville and has been portraying Thomas Jefferson since the early ’90s, although it’s something he only does a few times each year. With a red wig on, he bears a strong resemblance to our third president, a bit shorter but with a similarly angular face and piercing glare. McDowell is not a historian or an actor, and his primary interest is not, as it is with most reenactors, accuracy of dress or speech. What he cares about are ideas, the ideas of the Founding Fathers, which he feels are being forgotten and/or misunderstood in today’s world.

“We think we’re smarter than they were,” he said when I talked to him on Sunday, sitting in the hot sun on the corner of Park and Jefferson streets (named, by the way, for Thomas’ father Peter). “We don’t feed ourselves with ideas that are important or deep and that’s why [as a country] we’ve been diminishing.”

McDowell is co-founder and president of an organization called The Providence Foundation, which describes itself as “a Christian educational organization whose mission is to train and network leaders to transform their culture for Christ, and to teach all citizens how to disciple nations.” They aim to do this primarily by spreading the word that the Founding Fathers were devout Christians who established the country soundly on ideas that come from the Bible and on the teachings of Jesus Christ. To this end, they host seminars with titles like “America’s Christian History & Biblical Government,” and conduct Christian history tours of Monticello and Montpelier.

McDowell wishes that Americans knew more about Jefferson.

“Unfortunately,” he told me, “most of what they know is wrong.”

In particular, McDowell, and a lot of like-minded people, want the world to know two things: that Thomas Jefferson was not the father of Sally Hemings’ children, and that he was very much a follower of Christ.

Mark Belles portrays James Monroe. (Photo by John Robinson)

For the record
“[Jefferson] calls himself a Christian, we’ll start with that, that’s the only one worth discussing. The previous one is just bullshit…He did it, O.K.? It’s just so tiring and boring and it destroys your credibility from the outset.”

That’s Peter Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia and author or co-author of numerous books about our third president. The mere mention of McDowell’s two points renders him near apoplectic.

“Jefferson called himself a Christian, but [he was] not a kind of Christian that any modern day, so-called evangelical would recognize as such,” Onuf said.

Jefferson was a Deist, and Deists were Christians, but Onuf calls him a “serious student of religion,” who had real doubts about Christian doctrine, pointing out that at one point Jefferson referred to himself as “a church of one.”

The popular story of how Jefferson made his own Bible by removing all of the parts he didn’t like is true. Jefferson didn’t believe in the Trinity, Onuf said, or the main tenets of orthodox Christianity, and he was “hostile to miracles.”

Taking a leap of faith, for Jefferson, would be taking a leap into what Onuf calls, “the abyss of tyranny and despotism.” And because he saw religious tyranny as indistinguishable from all other forms, he strongly advocated a separation of church and state.

Listening to McDowell made me angry, but it also made me realize how tightly I hold on to my own image of Jefferson. Spend any length of time here, and it’s hard not to have an opinion of the man, whose face stares at you from innumerable portraits and statues, whose name drips from the lips of practically every figure of local authority, and whose words still shape and direct the basic reality of Charlottesville. The Jefferson I grew up with and admired was a Deist, a strong believer in rationalism, the Enlightenment, and the separation of church and state, and he enjoyed frequent sex with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves.

Stephen McDowell was telling me otherwise, and he was the official Thomas Jefferson at Charlottesville’s 250th anniversary celebration. If you can’t trust a man dressed as Thomas Jefferson, who can you trust?

There are many reasons why people become involved in historical reenactment, the most common being a love of history and an interest in acting. I suspect that some people —usually the guys sleeping on beds of straw, lighting fires with rocks, and sneaking beer coolers into Revolutionary War camps—see it as a kind of survival challenge, while for others it’s about make-believe and escapism, the chance to leave the modern world behind and be someone else for a while.

Of course, for many of the people in Civil War garb it’s personal, a matter of national and regional identity, a question of family, heritage and, depending on who you ask, the legacy of hate. And then there’s someone like Bruce Eades, who was part of the Vietnam War display in Lee Park. Eades is a Vietnam veteran, so when he puts on his old uniform and stands next to a DayGlo Volkswagen van with fake hippies protesting the war, he’s reenacting his own history as well as America’s. Eades works with vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, trying to ensure that what happened in his day won’t happen to them. For him, history is something we can learn from and use to change the future. For him, history is close enough that you can still smell the smoke.

The burden of blood
Rob Coles’ reasons for impersonating Thomas Jefferson are also personal, but intimately so, because he’s actually Jefferson’s fifth great grandson. He’s 6′ 2″, just like his famous ancestor, with red hair, now almost white, and freckles. And also like Jefferson, Coles was born in Albemarle County and, except for a very brief period in the mid-’70s, Albemarle County is where he’s lived all his life.

One thing Coles told me he didn’t inherit from his famous ancestor is Jefferson’s intellect. He said this many times, and maybe it was a calculated bit of PR, taking care to be properly deferential to eminence. But I can’t help but wonder if it’s something else, a personal sense of failure perhaps, the inevitable result of being, and at the same time not being, Thomas Jefferson.

Coles does 120 gigs a year, more or less, which when multiplied by 36 years equals a staggering amount of time spent wearing shoes with buckles on them and pants that don’t reach below your knees. He talks to schools, corporate groups, historical societies, ladies’ clubs, garden clubs, you name it. Some groups don’t want a performance; they just want him to be there, to greet people in costume and grace the event with Mr. Jefferson’s presence.

The story of how Rob Coles became Thomas Jefferson has a classic Hollywood beginning. It was 1975 and Coles was 23. He’d gone to UVA but hadn’t distinguished himself academically, and so after school he found himself digging holes and planting trees at a nursery, with no real idea what to do next.

Ron Grow did have an idea, however. Grow worked in television and was touring Monticello looking for a way to capitalize on the upcoming bicentennial celebrations. Hey, one of the guides said, I know this guy named Rob Coles who not only looks like Thomas Jefferson, he’s actually related to him. Grow gave Coles a call and next thing Coles knew he was part of a traveling Tom Jefferson revival.

Thirty-six years later, Coles still portrays Jefferson for a living—it’s his sole means of income—and it’s taken him to 48 states as well as Italy, Poland, and France, plus gigs at the 2000 Republican National Convention and Mount Rushmore. He’s even been invited to a few weddings, usually UVA alums wanting Mr. Jefferson to bless the nuptials.

“People want figures of veneration,” Coles said. “I know when I speak to these students at the University, they’re just like, ‘Wow!’…The students I deal with, they’re amazed by the guy. Sometimes when you deal with someone every day you sort of lose some of that.”
But except for excited UVA students, the truth is that living history—or any history really—doesn’t loom large in most people’s lives, save for in memories of school field trips and occasional jokes about Civil War obsessives. Most people, I suspect, find historical reenacting to be a bit silly.

I say this as someone who has himself stood in the hot sun in a tricorn hat and knee-length pants demonstrating an archaic task to bored children. My father roped me into helping him teach 18th century hemp rope making one summer at various living history events around Virginia, and while some nominal research was done, the veracity of our display was dubious at best. Basically, it was something he made up so he could go around and make hemp ropes. I suspect that this is the motivation behind a lot of historical reenactment, which is fine; people liked it, learned something, and no one got hurt.

Unlike Elvis impersonators, historical reenactors usually step softly, treating their characters and the past with reverence. Because of this, living history often seems a bit fusty and staid. It’s rarely radical or progressive or activist. It’s a museum display, only animated. You’d be hard-pressed to find Rob Cole’s performance as Jefferson controversial. Popular topics for his audiences right now are Jefferson’s ambassadorship to France, and his relationship to mentor George Wythe. The entire time I talked to him, Coles never mentioned slavery, Sally Hemings, or religion.

But it seems to me that our country’s relationship to its history has changed of late. On Memorial Day I took a trip down to Virginia’s historical theme park, Colonial Williamsburg, where I watched a George Washington impersonator read a document known as “Washington’s Farewell Address,” written when our first president was old and tired and finally leaving politics behind. It’s a letter of support and advice for the young country, with warnings about the dangers of political parties, foreign wars and debt, and exhortations to keep the Union and the Constitution strong.

As I listened, I realized that the problems Washington addressed 200 years ago are the exact same problems we’re dealing with today, which is why so many people have begun calling for 200-year-old solutions. Tea Party activists waving flags that read “Don’t Tread On Me” hold dearest to their hearts a renewed belief in an original interpretation of the Constitution as a sacred and immutable object, but they can’t reduce the contemporary political discussion to a historical reenactment.

Straight from the source
There were two other reenactors sitting next to McDowell during Charlottesville’s living history weekend, dressed as fellow local heroes James Madison and James Monroe, but it was Jefferson the people wanted to talk to. Three young women, recent UVA grads all, sat down, seemingly for a lark, wanting to shoot the shit with the man who’d made their last four years possible.

After expressing his surprise that there were now women at his University, McDowell, in character, asked them what they knew about him. They responded fairly quickly, one saying that Jefferson believed in freedom of religion and the other saying that he had some “serious cognitive dissonance about owning slaves.”

The next question was so perfect I couldn’t believe it. One of the grads asked what “as a Deist” Jefferson thought about religion. It was a slow pitch right over the plate, and watching McDowell swing at it was fascinating.

“Well,” he said, “I wish to correct a misunderstanding. I am not a Deist.”

He then pointed out that Jefferson was a regular churchgoer who founded a church that met in the Albemarle Courthouse right over there behind them. Nor, he said, was Jefferson a secularist. The whole separation of church and state thing was a misunderstanding. He only meant it to work one way; government shouldn’t interfere with the practice of religion, but the teachings of Christ should absolutely be a part of the practice of government.

“I am a Christian,” he said. “In the true sense of the word.”

Behold the power of the costume.

“I remember learning in school that Jefferson was a Deist,” one of the women said. “It must have been a liberal interpretation.”

“Consider the source,” Jefferson advised.

An excellent idea. The source, in this case, is someone who, although he has a degree in physics and a masters in geology, is not a history scholar, and who, when asked how much research he does to play Jefferson, said he does some, but not as much as people who portray the man for a living. The source, however, happens to be dressed like Jefferson and to be speaking how we imagine someone from the 18th century would speak, all of which carries a lot of weight.

In our immediate vicinity, there are three well-known Jefferson impersonators whose credentials easily outshine McDowell’s. There’s Coles, who in addition to being related to Jefferson has been playing him longer than probably anybody alive. But then there’s also Bill Barker, the man who fills the role at Colonial Williamsburg, and Steve Edenbo, who was a resident fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies, and who has studied acting at the American Historical Theater, an organization created solely to train people in the art of historical interpretation. So then why did the city pick McDowell?

Choosing the reenactors for the living history weekend was the job of the Charlottesville 250 steering committee, a group of 26 Charlottesville citizens including the mayor, Steven Meeks, the President of the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, and Mary Scot-Fleming, Director of Enrichment Programs for the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. I wonder if the last two paid any attention to who played Jefferson, and if they did, what they thought of his performance. But the reason McDowell was picked is most likely the work of the committee’s co-chair, a man named Mark Beliles.

Beliles co-founded the Providence Foundation with McDowell and serves as senior pastor at Grace Covenant Church in Charlottesville. According to various online bios, Beliles “frequently advises Christian prime-ministers, vice-presidents, congressmen, and members of parliaments on Biblical principles of government.” His dissertation, for his Ph.D. from Whitefield Theological Seminary, an unaccredited school in Florida, was on “Churches and Politics in Jefferson’s Virginia,” and Beliles was right there with McDowell on Sunday, sitting at his side dressed as James Madison.

Spend time watching historical reenactors and it quickly becomes clear that most of their audience has a particular area of interest or axe to grind. A retired Navy officer got involved in a long discussion with McDowell about Jefferson’s use of the Navy to fight the Barbary War, a conflict between the U.S. and the countries known today as Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia.

“It is very important that we maintain our military might,” McDowell/Jefferson said, in order to fight any “infidel powers” that might arise. He discussed how “it appears that these people only respond to force.” At one point he referred to the Barbary pirates as “Muslim terrorists.”
The ex-Navy man said that he always admired the way Jefferson sought to learn about many different people; he had, for instance owned a Quran. Of course, our Jefferson replied. When fighting the Barbary powers, it was important to understand things, like “where did these people get their ideas that I think are so absurd?”

According to UVA’s Peter Onuf, the Barbary War was primarily fought over commercial issues; North African pirates had been threatening European trade for years, and had begun attacking American ships as well, capturing sailors and holding them hostage for ransom.
“Of course they were infidels,” Onuf said. “But it’s worth remembering that Jefferson, and the Virginia Baptists alike, at different points, said that freedom of religion must extend to Muslims.”

As for the comment about the Quran, Onuf points out that Jefferson was a student of comparative religion, and felt that the Bible was rife with internal contradictions. If Jefferson owned a Quran in order to understand its “absurd” ideas, he owned a Bible for the same exact reason.

History is a broken record
“English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.” —Malcolm Bradbury
Often, when he’s telling an audience about the Declaration of Independence, or Jefferson’s time in France, Rob Coles wonders if the things he’s talking about are the right things. If you were Thomas Jefferson, what would you say? It’s a heavy responsibility, not only because the issues are so vital, but also because you’re speaking for someone who can’t speak for himself. In any other situation we’d see it as the height of arrogance, but the Founding Fathers are different. We feel that their words do not belong solely to them, but to all of us, and that it’s our duty to treat them not as finished statements, but as things forever in the process of being said.

Historical reenactors, Onuf said, usually do a perfectly good job.

“They’re frontline interpreters and teachers. They have a compelling way to relate to their audiences.”

But the next time you find yourself listening to a man in a wig and a funny hat, telling you how our country began and why, it’s worth remembering that there’s no one regulating living history. Anyone who wants to can dress like Thomas Jefferson and make speeches in Court Square. And because they look like him, and speak with authority, we tend to assume that they speak the truth. And who owns the truth?

It’s a question that really gets Onuf going.

“Is this the triumph of relativism? Does everyone get to have their own history?”

Jefferson was obsessed with keeping his letters and writings so that future generations could know and understand what he said, but “the idea that he would be up for grabs in these silly ways would turn him over in his grave,” Onuf said.

One letter that’s especially relevant to this discussion is one Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1789. In it, he asks, “Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another?”

I think it’s safe to say that what Jefferson hated more than anything was tyranny, and tyranny comes in many forms.

“[N]o society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law,” Jefferson wrote to Madison. “The earth belongs to the living and not to the dead.”

He knew that the world would change, and that instead of being shackled by history, each generation needed the freedom to craft laws and solutions that fit their times. Just as he feared any human despot, Jefferson also feared the tyranny of the past.

Our Founding Fathers were defined by their desire to sever their connections to what came before, by words and laws—if necessary, through war. I tend to roll my eyes when someone in Charlottesville uses a Jefferson quote to defend a position or make a point. Given the frequency with which that happens here, understanding who’s using the words, and to what end, is vitally important.

We want to talk to the Founding Fathers because we feel that they got America right and we’ve gotten it wrong. Once, long ago, they gave us the answers. If we keep asking, maybe they’ll give them to us again. We speak to historical reenactors as if they really were Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, but of course they’re not, they’re just the clowns at America’s birthday party, twisting the past into funny shapes so today’s children can be entertained.

Categories
Living

Once a Marine: How a Charlottesville veteran is telling the story of a soldier’s transition to civilian life

When Stephen Canty watched his little brother leave on his first deployment as a Marine in the fall of 2011, he recognized the grin on Joe’s face as the same one he had worn himself three years earlier. They’d all been grinning then, the guys in 1st battalion, 6th Marines, Charlie Company, excited to be Marines and eager as hell to see combat.

But after eight months in Helmand Province, the excitement waned, and by the time their second deployment came around, the grins were all gone. Before he left, Joe spent most of his time on his parents’ couch, sleeping or stuffing his face with popcorn, so the brothers never really got around to talking about Afghanistan or war. Watching him get on the bus at Camp Lejeune, Canty felt like a parent watching a child head off to college. He knew his little brother was going to go through the same things he did and that they would change him forever, but he also knew that telling him was pointless. War isn’t something you can understand if you haven’t experienced it. It was his brother’s time to grin. His time to lose it would come soon enough.

Stephen Canty pictured as a 17-year-old high school senior (left) and again as a 19-year-old Marine deployed to Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Photos: Courtesy Stephen Canty
Stephen Canty pictured as a 17-year-old high school senior (left) and again as a 19-year-old Marine deployed to Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Photos: Courtesy Stephen Canty

There’s no shortage of stories about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by now we all think we know how they go. Our government sends young men overseas to do things that are difficult to justify strategically and morally, and hard to live with afterwards. When they have trouble after they come back, we call it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and say, “Thank you for your service.” Later, after a few beers, we may pop the question we’ve been dying to ask: “Have you ever killed anyone?” What we really mean is, “What’s going to happen to me when I die?” Because the biggest thing that separates us from them is that they were given permission to kill people and, in a funny kind of way, permission to die. If you’ve stared death in the eyes, then you must have some stories to tell, and we want them to tell us those stories, because we know one day we’ll have to face death unprepared, and we’re scared shitless.

Being a Marine was the most powerful and important experience of Stephen Canty’s life. Over a beer at Miller’s he told me stories of death, plenty of them, but he also told me a story about sleeping in a burned out house in Garmsir that was next to a field of fragrant purple flowers, and how at night when he was guarding the desert their scent would fill the air. And about the time he and Chuck were driving to Kandahar, their Humvee flying over the sand dunes with AC/DC playing loud over their headsets. It was a cool 80 degrees, and they would be home soon, so they passed cigarettes back and forth and were filled with joy.

“It’s the most despicable stuff, and the most amazing stuff,” Canty said. “Some of those moments, I’ll just remember for the rest of my life, like ‘That was so cool.’ It’s an adventure. It’s like Huckleberry Finn. Cause really, you are just kids. And you think that you’ve got these grand ideas of what this trip is gonna be like, and then you find out that, hey, combat really sucks.”

It’s impossible to communicate what it’s like being a Marine to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, and yet that’s exactly what Canty’s trying to do. He took up photography during his second deployment in Afghanistan as a way to remember his experiences. Later, after he got home, he got his hands on a camera that could shoot movies and promptly fell in love with the idea of using film to tell stories.

The men of Charlie Company have stories, about the war and what came after the war, of failed marriages and failed jobs, of drinking and drugging and trying to forget, of bad backs and bad knees, high anxiety and low testosterone, ringing ears and crushing loneliness. But these aren’t stories they can tell to most of the people in their lives, not to their wives, or girlfriends, or their parents, and not their co-workers, or their shrink, if they have one. And they certainly can’t tell them to you when they meet you at a bar and you buy them a beer and thank them for whatever service you think they’ve rendered. But they can tell a fellow Marine.

And so Canty is making a documentary called Once a Marine, and he’s devoting everything he has to doing it, because he knows that his friends can’t heal if they never tell their stories, and that we can’t help them if we never listen.

Darren Doss, Canty’s best friend and the producer of Once a Marine, shows off his track marks and tattoos after an interview session in July. Photo: Stephen Canty
Darren Doss, Canty’s best friend and the producer of Once a Marine, shows off his track marks and tattoos after an interview session in July. Photo: Stephen Canty

Platoon

“You’ll see [their eyes] brimming with tears,” Canty said, reflecting on looking at fellow combat veterans through a viewfinder. “But they’re kind of used to dealing with that and hiding it. It’s kind of like a storm that passes really quickly. And I’m kind of the same way, it’s like there’s a lot of things that I really haven’t thought about for years, and this brings it up, and I’ll tear up, or whatever. And it doesn’t even need to be sad. It’s a cleansing type feeling, and it kinda comes and goes throughout the interview.”

When Canty first had the idea of making a film to document his friends’ experiences as they adjusted to civilian life, no one would agree to talk, but finally he got his buddy Mehmedovic to come down to Charlottesville, and his willingness seemed to loosen the other guys up. This past summer Canty got four more interviews done, driving up to New York for one, and down to North Carolina for another, but it took all of his savings. He has a list of people he wants to interview, from New York  to Florida, and maybe even as far away as Alaska, and now people are getting in touch with him, saying, hey man, when are you gonna come talk to me?

Canty usually starts with easy questions about boot camp, before moving on to anything really heavy. It takes about 15 minutes for them to get warmed up, but by the 30-minute mark the conversation has usually started getting pretty honest.

“I tried to throw my marriage away a few years ago. Because, between the government shoving pills down my throat, and having absolutely no emotions whatsoever, to not knowing what I wanted out of life, or what I wanted to do with life, or even living life period. Or what I was gonna do next, or what I was gonna do before or after whatever. Without her, absolutely, right now, what I’ve noticed, the past nine years, what it’s really come to, is that without her I wouldn’t … I think about it more like, how do I sit here and look at 10 guys who are looking at me thinking, ‘Hey, you’re gonna lead us through this patrol,’ and here I am sittin’ here thinkin’, what would I do without my wife. It’s hard to swallow, you know?”

“Here I am, trying to hold the kid down, trying to hold him still so I can wipe [his] butt, you know, but then in my mind, I’m also thinking, ‘Wow, this is just like trying to hold someone down who’s squirming, who’s bleeding, and you’re trying to pack the wound.’”

“And that’s an image that I can’t get out of my head … The image of someone dying as you look them in the eyes is nightmarish. It’s something no one should ever see. But the fact that it still haunts me shows that there’s something beyond military affiliation, there’s something beyond whether or not this person’s trying to kill you, or trying to kill your friends, there’s something on a human level that [tells you] that as a member of the animal kingdom, you probably shouldn’t be killing your own species.”

Canty has read a lot of stories about veterans and seen a lot of documentaries too. What he hasn’t seen is the level of candor he’s getting from his friends.

“I think they’re being as fully honest with me as they are with themselves,” he said.  “There’s a lot of stuff that, even in myself that I haven’t come to terms with or processed, and I think that they’re kind of on the same page. Some of them are further along in that progress than others.”

Watch the Kickstarter presentation for Once a Marine below…

Part of being honest for a Marine is talking about the fact that you loved being in war and hated it all at once. Loved what it did to you, despite the danger. Like how being in an ambush made Canty feel incredibly alive, as if his body had been plugged into a socket and shot up with electricity.

“Even now, thinking about it, I can feel it. When I think about combat, when I think about this stuff, my heart starts to beat faster, and I feel this … I feel … I awaken. … And that only really happens with [combat], and with film. That’s how I know [film] is my calling,” he said.

Categories
News

My first gun: Looking for safe ground in the middle of the gun debate

The decision to buy a gun came suddenly. I was gulping down coffee before work and reading about the latest shooting, when my right to bear arms overwhelmed me. I ran out into the Virginia sunshine, jumped in my Prius, and headed to Walmart.

Ever since the Aurora movie theater shooting, I’ve been consumed by the gun debate, righteously posting articles on Facebook and arguing out loud with my shadow. As a child, I’d loved guns as much as the next American boy, but politics, and the fear that another madman was lurking right around the corner, had turned me into a raving, anti-gun nut.

If I bought a gun, I thought, maybe it would come with some new understanding.

Because a question had been nagging at me for a long time. Did they, the rabid gun owners and Second Amendment defenders, at the very least understand why, after what happened in Newtown, some people might want to ban guns like the AR-15?

More even than a change of mind, I think I was looking for empathy, just one person on the other side of the issue who could admit that in the first few seconds after hearing that 20 children and six adults were shot and killed in an elementary school, he paused for a moment, looked at his gun collection and thought, “What the hell am I doing with these?”

The Walmart sports and leisure department was quiet, display cases only half full, and the ammo shelves practically empty. I asked a passing sales associate if someone could help me with the guns.

“I want to buy the Crickett,” I said. “The pink one.”

It took 25 minutes for me to become a gun owner. At that point I’d been working on this story for about two weeks. There would be many more weeks to come, during which the six month anniversary of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School would come and go, and a man would walk through downtown Santa Monica firing a semi-automatic rifle, killing five people before he was shot and killed by the police. Two thousand one hundred and twenty Americans would be killed by guns during the 12 weeks I worked on the story; 50 of them in Virginia, and two in Albemarle County.

The manager had to carry the box through the store. Once we were outside, she handed it over. She asked me who I was buying it for.

“Me,” I said. “It’s my first gun.”

She gave me a look. “They do come in black, you know.”

 

Small arms for small arms

At 1pm on April 30, three days before I bought my gun, a mother in Burkesville, Kentucky stepped outside onto the porch to empty a mop bucket and in that brief moment her 5-year-old son shot and killed his 2-year-old sister with a Crickett he’d been given for his birthday. The gun, which only holds one bullet, had accidentally been left loaded, leaning in a corner.

“Just one of those crazy accidents,” the coroner told the Lexington Herald-Leader. It was in fact the fourth such crazy accident that month. In New Jersey, a 6-year-old and a 4-year-old friend were playing “pretend shooting” with another .22 caliber rifle, resulting in the 4-year-old being shot. The next day, a woman in Tennessee was shot and killed by her 4-year-old, and then later in the month, in Washington state, a 7-year-old boy grabbed his older brother’s .22 and accidently shot his 9-year-old sister, who thankfully lived. Also in April, a Political Action Committee called the Granite State Patriots Liberty PAC held a rally at the New Hampshire Statehouse. In the crowd was an 11-year-old boy carrying an AR-15 and waving a flag that said “Come and Take It.” The boy told the local paper he was there to stand up for gun rights.

My father doesn’t target shoot and he hates hunting. He was a hippie who dodged the draft and drove a VW bus from Virginia out to Haight-Ashbury in time to catch the Late Summer/Early Fall of Love. Yet he owns guns, likes them even. There were five in the house I grew up in, including a Vietnam era Colt AR-15, the semi-auto, civilian version of the M-16 he would have carried, and perhaps used, if he’d fulfilled his patriotic duty and gone to war.

Maybe that’s the seed of my internal conflict, a house full of guns that no one wants to shoot. A long haired Deadhead in my youth, I nevertheless grew up playing soldier, and even as my politics grew increasingly, and angrily, leftist, I never considered guns a problem.

It was Columbine that did it. Columbine scared me.

After some time off, I went back to college in 1997, just in time for a string of school shootings to hit the news. I was pretty cynical about most of them, making macabre, juvenile jokes with a similarly angry friend about starting a Kip Kinkle defense fund, Kinkle being the 15-year-old from Oregon, who, in 1998 shot and killed his parents and then walked to his high school with two knives, two pistols, a rifle, and over a thousand rounds hidden under his trench coat. He killed two students and wounded 25, and my friend and I were young and angry and when Kinkle said, “If there was a God he wouldn’t let me feel the way I do. There is no God, only hate,” we thought it was cool.

Then came Virginia Tech, which didn’t feel that far away, because if you grew up in Charlottesville, you had lots of friends who went to school there, probably hung out in Blacksburg more than once, and maybe even knew someone who lost someone. I drove to Blacksburg a week after the shooting, uncertain whether I was there as a journalist or a tourist, recording for some sort of posterity the prayer circles, the candles and flowers and tears, and the long lines for merchandise in the school bookstore.

And then Aurora, and Newtown, and I began to feel worn down and worn out, but also angry at the people whose only response to all this horror was to circle the wagons, plant an American flag, and buy more guns.

In many ways, I’m not that different from the people on the other side of this debate. My heroes, people like William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson, are just as infatuated with guns, and just as prone to confusing self indulgence with freedom. When I lean to the left I lean too far, teetering on the edge of anger, and when the government tells me I can’t do something, it just makes me want to do it four times as bad.

Eventually the bullets hit even closer to home. Last year, a C-VILLE employee named Beth Walton, was shot and killed by Noah Romando, her 19-year-old son, who also killed his 16-year-old sister, his 14-year-old brother, and then himself. He apparently used a .22 hunting rifle, although it seems he’d also bought a handgun, how or where we don’t know. Nor do we know why. Romando left three notes behind, the contents sealed from public scrutiny, and many questions we’ll never be able to answer.

Here’s a starting point. Gun crime is down, gun ownership is down, and gun sales are up. Mass shootings are a major issue and the gun control debate has reached a boiling point. There have to be gun control measures that would curb violence without egregiously limiting personal freedom. There has to be a rational middle ground.

How about this: We shouldn’t market guns to kids. We shouldn’t let kids use guns at all, the way we don’t let them drive a car or operate a skill saw. Isn’t that something we can all agree on? If we can settle that, then maybe we can talk about universal background checks, armor piercing bullets, and guns designed specifically to kill people quickly, right?

The gun that a child in Kentucky used to kill his baby sister, the gun I bought at Walmart, is called the Crickett. It’s a bolt action .22, 30 inches long, with a black metal barrel and a plastic body. The box has a big cartoon cricket on the front (Davey Crickett is his name) and then “My First Rifle” in large green letters. Just below that, in very small letters, it says “NOT A TOY.”

The shooting in Kentucky brought a lot of negative attention to the Crickett, and Keystone Sporting Arms took down the Crickett website (with its “kids corner” featuring a photo gallery of cute kids holding their Cricketts), Facebook page, and Twitter feed and began the by now familiar mantra of “no comment,” appealing to the family’s need for privacy.

Three days later, the National Rifle Association held a Youth Day at its annual meeting. Shirts with “NRA” spelled out in crayons were available for kids and bibs with “NRA” on toy blocks for babies. There were also, of course, lots and lots of kids guns for sale, including the pink Crickett.

“It was her time to go, I guess,” said the grandmother of the dead 2-year-old in Kentucky. “I just know she’s in heaven right now and I know she’s in good hands with the Lord.”

Exactly three weeks after that, 10-year-old Maggie Hollified was shot and killed in Crozet by her 13-year-old brother. The family had recently moved here from Tennessee so Maggie’s father could take over as pastor of the Commonwealth Christian Community. The Hollifield’s four children were homeschooled and their 13-year-old son Nathan liked to hunt. As a reward for completing a hunter safety course, a relative gave Nathan the shotgun that would kill his sister. On the morning of May 21, legal records show that he was trying to fix the gun, and it was pointing at his sister Maggie as she stood behind a loveseat when it fired.

The shooting, like the one in Kentucky and so many others, was called a “tragic accident” and the case was closed. There were many things about the incident that were accidental (the finger on the trigger, the forgotten shotgun shell, the sister hidden behind the loveseat), but not the gun. The gun was there on purpose.

Categories
Arts

Out there: A conversation with extraterrestrial expert Dr. Steven Greer

On Thursday, Dr. Steven Greer will appear at the Paramount to introduce the biographical documentary SIRIUS, which follows Greer, an emergency room physician better known for his work with extraterrestrials and government secrets. Extraterrestrials, he says, have been visiting this planet for some time, and our government has been shooting their vehicles down and studying their technology.

This technology can free us from our dependence on fossil fuels and change our lives for the better, but fossil fuels make too much money for certain powerful people, and those people are bent on keeping this technology a secret.

Dr. Greer has been battling them for some time via two organizations he founded: the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI), which makes contact with E.T.s and welcomes them to our planet, and The Disclosure Project, which is dedicated to securing the release of everything the government knows. SIRIUS is part documentary about that work, and part fundraiser for the third step, actually bringing that alien technology to the people. C-VILLE spoke with Dr. Greer recently at his farm in western Albemarle County.

C-VILLE: How did you get into this line of work? Do you call it ufology?

Dr. Steven Greer: No, never.

What do you call it?

The UFO term is a misnomer. It was invented by the intelligence community after they knew that they weren’t unidentified. When I was about 8 I had a sighting of a disc-shaped craft outside Charlotte, North Carolina, and I knew what I had seen, because it was completely non-aerodynamic.

These objects that people see fall into two categories: extraterrestrial vehicles, which are ones that are quite unusual, and things that are man-made that look like a flying saucer that we began developing in the ’40s and ’50s.

So, the big story here is probably less of the E.T. story, than it is a technology story and the national security state run amok.

Basically, there are areas that are called Unacknowledged Special Access Projects. A USAP is a coded or numbered program that is run completely without any real paper trail, and without the review of Congress or the President. It’s the subject no one wants to talk [about]. It’s the giggle factor. It’s the kook factor. No one wants to be associated with it because, to be honest with you, the media…have been lackeys in my opinion.

C-VILLE isn’t important enough to be made a lackey.

I know that. You’re not the New York Times, which is why you can do this story. The New York Times wouldn’t be allowed to. In fact I have a family member who worked for The Boston Globe and she said, “Absolutely, we would not be allowed to do a story on this.”

What led you to start actually studying them with CSETI?

In 1990 I had another contact event, and I thought ‘what I ought to do is see if we could put teams together to go out and make contact.’ I discovered that there was no department anywhere dealing with the fact that we’re being visited, and that there ought to be some sort of diplomatic outreach. CSETI is our global attempt, and now we have several thousand teams who are learning these protocols that are very controversial because they involve remote viewing consciousness, things that are into the weird area. But I tell people, if it’s not pretty strange, it’s not going to be E.T.

You say that people working with you have been killed.

Back in the day, before I authorized the level of security and protection we have now, there were some folks who really wanted to help us, and they, three or four of them, died in quick succession.

One was my right hand assistant, Shari Adamiak—[she] and a member of Congress and I all got metastatic cancer—we were all supposed to die. Very mysteriously, you wonder how it happened, virtually the same month. So they all died, and I survived. Barely.

Then, there’s a former CIA director named Bill Colby who had been part of these classified programs and knew about these technologies, and he was going to bring one of these technologies out to us, and the week that he was going to meet with a member of my board they found him floating down the Potomac River.

His son just came out with a book saying that his father must have committed suicide, but he didn’t.

At this point I don’t take anything for granted in terms of my security, but what I tell people is, there’s safety in numbers, and there’s safety in having a lot of people know what you’re doing. Everything I have (and about 85 percent of the material I have is not in the public yet) is in places that if something happens to me, boom. And it would be devastating.

Tell me about Sirius.

We’ve started a company called Sirius Technology Advanced Research, STAR, which would be the parent company to raise the funds to build a research [facility] here in the Charlottesville area. I have a disc with several thousand pages of designs and unknown patents that has been provided to us. But you need a laboratory.

You can’t walk into UVA and do this at a lab. Why? Because their equipment isn’t dealing with 10 million volts at a fraction of a watt. You have to custom build the systems.

This is the part that people don’t understand, that this is actually really serious science. This is about a $10 million R&D effort, $6 to 10 million, conservatively. But it’s got to be done. You’re dealing with such complex physics and materials. You need nanocrystalline materials, you need specialized Kawasaki analyzers that can deal with thousands or millions of volts as opposed to 110 or 120 which is what we run our appliances on.

Who, exactly, is keeping this information secret?

It changes. For example, in the past, we have some documents that listed Dr. Oppenheimer and Dr. Vannevar Bush, who worked on the Manhattan Project, the so-called Majestic Committee.

There have been various people, I mean, George Shultz has been involved in this committee. Dick Cheney has been involved with the committee, there was a Democrat from California who’s passed away, named Congressman Brown who was on this committee, CIA director Helms

Not all of them are intelligence and military, some of them are corporate titans. Their consensus has been, until fairly recently, that this stuff is secret and should stay secret. Now, I found out a few years ago that now there’s a majority of them that think it should come out, but they’re still a little afraid to do it.

This work subjects you to a lot of ridicule.

Oh, and hatred.

Has that been difficult?

I think it’s been more difficult for my family than it has been for me. For me, I persevere. Some of it’s been painful, and frightening, and sad, but ultimately what keeps me going is the vision. Once you know this is true, and you know that there are, not only intelligent life out there in the universe that’s here, but that we may have come from some of these civilizations, life on Earth may have been seeded from them, and then on top of that, there are sciences and technologies that are already existing that would give us a whole new civilization without poverty or pollution, that’s worth doing something about.

Tickets for the screening of SIRIUS are $15 and available at www.theparamount.net. CSETI also offers three day Contact Trainings and Expeditions for $495 (there’s one in Charlottesville May 10-12). For budget minded DIYers, there’s an E.T. Contact Tool app, $6.99 for iPhone, $9.99 for iPad. 

Aliens. Are you in? Tell us what you think below.

More links:

Tickets 

SIRIUS The Movie 

Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence  

The Disclosure Project 

Contact Trainings and Expeditions 

ET Contact Tool app  

Categories
Arts

Living in America: Shabazz Palaces clears the way for Seattle’s new music royalty

Seattle will probably never rid itself of the albatross around its neck that is grunge, but since at least 2005, the home of Cobain and company has been undergoing a rap renaissance, with a scene that rivals the ’90s era for depth and breadth of talent.

Recently, I read an article that made me rethink my assumptions about the city’s place in the music world—and the morality of Somali pirates.

The article was about a rap group called Malitia Malimob, two young men, “Somali born/Seattle bred,” who use the template of American gangster rap to tell the darker side of the modern American immigrant story. I was intrigued, and liked their music, but there was very little information about Malitia Malimob online, besides a link to its current tour dates as the opening act for two other Seattle hip-hop groups, Shabazz Palaces and THEESatisfaction. Clicking the link, I was surprised to find that halfway through the tour the duo was coming to The Southern Cafe & Music Hall.

In 2011, Sub Pop, the indie record label that first signed Nirvana and almost single-handedly sold grunge to the world, released Black Up, the first full-length album from Shabazz Palaces, one of Seattle Hip-Hop’s biggest stars.

Black Up was named best local album that year by The Seattle Times, got a rave review from Pitchfork and a write up in The New Yorker. Palaces co-founder Ishmael Butler is something of an elder statesman on the scene due to his previous membership in ’90s jazz-rap pioneer, Digable Planets.

Like Digable Planets, Shabazz Palaces’ music is experimental and free-form, except now the jazziness has been filtered through a laptop and digitally shredded. The songs are dark and atmospheric, the lyrics political, yet hard to pin down. Shabazz Palaces is often called “difficult,” which I think probably stems from the relatively simplistic idea most rock fans have of rap.

Labelmate THEESatisfaction is comprised of two women, Stasia Irons and Catherine Harris-White, who met at the University of Washington, fell in love, and started making beautiful music together—loopy, playfully political, neo-soul/hip-hop—to make a stab at precision.

THEESatisfaction first came to attention in a guest spot on the Shabazz Palaces album, and there’s a clear kinship between the groups, although THEESatisfaction is lighter, more soulful and groove-filled, and, I suppose, more feminist.

But it’s the opening act, the group no one’s ever heard of, that I find most compelling. The Somali Civil War, which began in 1991 and has yet to end, led to a wave of refugees fleeing to the U.S. (124 have been settled in Charlottesville since 1999, according to the International Rescue Committee), and finding themselves living in the worst parts of their new cities, forced to deal with racism, islamophobia, and the myriad other problems that typically beset strangers in a strange land.

There’s an unofficial video for the Malitia Malimob song “Pirates” that traces the story of Somali piracy back to the 1980s, when men piloted their boats into the Arabian Sea in search of fish not hostages. In the chaos following the outbreak of civil war, huge corporate ships started illegally fishing off the coast of Somalia, and barrels of toxic waste began washing up on shore. So the fishermen took up arms and pointed their boats back out to sea.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJJcA43TW24

In many of the cities where they’ve settled, Somali youth have a reputation for above average involvement in gang violence. Guled Diriye and Mohamed Jurato, a.k.a. Malitia Malimob, were carried out of Somalia as children, one of them in a pirate’s boat, and found themselves growing up surrounded by drugs and gangs. Their songs move between both worlds with defiant ease, recognizing that the Somali pirates are mirror images of the boyz in Seattle’s hoods.

By connecting the African immigrant story to the African-American inner city story, Malitia Malimob’s music joins a long tradition of songs, from “This Land is Your Land” to “Straight Outta Compton,” that help define what it means to live in America. Malitia Malimob is less interesting musically than the two groups it’s touring with, and the pair has the same faults as many of their peers (casual misogyny, glorification of violence), but like all great rebel music, they give voice to the voiceless, speak hard truths, and send a shiver up your spine.

Shabazz Palaces with THEESatisfaction and Malitia Malimob/The Southern Cafe and Music Hall/April 29.

Categories
Living

Brothers: How four young black men found their mission to change our city, starting now

The Tonsler Park Recreation Center is busy at 4:30pm on a Wednesday. The long, L-shaped main room bustles with games of pool and chess, people coming and going past the old school Ms. Pac-Man game and the foosball table. Adults watch the T.V. on the wall, or sit and talk in small groups. You get the sense many are just killing time on a cold evening in the neighborhood.

Wes Bellamy isn’t killing time, he’s chasing it. Because even though he just arrived, he has to leave again to track down a girl in his after-school program, which officially starts at 4pm but which really starts when he gets all of the kids together. After passing some instructions to one of the older kids, he heads through the crowd out to the parking lot, past his trademark Dodge Charger, getting instead into an old minivan. Bellamy moves like an athlete, which he is. But he uses his spacial awareness and vision like a politician, timing his smiles, waves, and winks to make sure everyone gets a piece of him.

Then he’s gone, driving the couple blocks from the rec center over to the Sixth Street housing project, hopping out with the van still running, and knocking on an apartment door. There’s no answer and no one outside has seen the girl, so Bellamy gets back to the van and heads back to the rec center, no sign of irritation on his face. Inside, in a small room separated from the rest of the building by a sliding plastic wall, seven young men, ranging in age from 4 to 23, are getting ready to box.

Coach Tyrone and Coach Norman, Bellamy’s volunteer helpers, wrap hands with athletic tape, pull on gloves, and point out untied shoelaces. After stretching and doing jumping jacks, the kids divide into groups to work on shadowboxing. The room is small, 10′ x 20′ at most, and the kids’ efforts soon render the windows too foggy to see through. Most nights 12 or more kids show up, but even with only half that number—plus the coaches, a UVA student who’s helping out, not to mention the body bag and two speed bags—the room is crowded to the point of absurdity.

Bellamy has organized a step dance class for girls that takes place at the same time, but they’ve been forced out of the conference room they usually use to make way for a city planning meeting. The search is on for a space to practice, but until then, the girls fight for room in the crowded main hall, while the boys jab and faint in tightly circumscribed circles in the back room.

Take our brief survey on race in Charlottesville here.

The program is called HYPE, Helping Young People Evolve, and when it began on December 7, 2011 it was just Bellamy, some boxing gloves, and a punching bag. There are now 16 boys and seven girls who meet four days a week. At 26, Bellamy is only a few years older than the oldest of the boxers, but even so, he’s more than just a coach to these kids; he’s also a driver and a disciplinarian, a teacher and a mentor, sometimes a big brother, sometimes a parent.

“I was just like these kids,” he says. “I know what it’s like to not have things. I know what it’s like to have those surrogate fathers.”

The goal of HYPE is to use boxing and step dancing to instill discipline in young people, to help them grow and learn respect for themselves and for others. It’s open to all of the city’s children, but things in this world being what they are, the kids in HYPE all come from families below the poverty line and all of them are black.

When the training session is over, equipment put away, snacks distributed, one of the younger boys in the HYPE program runs over to Bellamy, interrupting our conversation to ask a question.
“Say excuse me,” Bellamy says, before telling the boy to turn around and try again. He walks a few steps, then comes back, says excuse me, and asks his question.

“Do you know him?” Bellamy asks, pointing to me.

“No,” the boy says.

And then, following Bellamy’s instructions, he holds out his hand and introduces himself. Bellamy places a large hand on the boy’s tiny head.

“You’ve worked hard,” he says. “And I’m proud of you.”

Categories
Living

Across 30 years and an epidemic, Charlottesville’s gay and lesbian communities came out together

In early 1986, Hospice of the Piedmont needed help with a patient who had less than a month to live. The organization’s purpose, then and now, is to care for terminal patients, but this patient had AIDS, and AIDS patients were different.

By the end of 1984, there were 10 reported AIDS cases in Charlottesville, 42 in Virginia. A year later, the total number in the state had jumped to 102, and Hospice board member Jim Heilman began pondering the idea of a group devoted solely to their treatment. Given the hysteria and fear surrounding the disease, as well as how quickly and miserably the patients died, AIDS cases required a special kind of care. When a particularly horrific case came to the door in 1986, Heilman called Blaise Spinelli, a 36-year-old med tech at UVA, and asked him if he wanted to help.

As a medical technician at UVA, Blaise Spinelli saw the first local victims of the AIDS epidemic in the early ‘80s and helped found the AIDS Services Group of Charlottesville in 1986. Photo: Billy Hunt

The patient was a young man in his mid- to late-20s, living outside of town with his sister and her husband in a rundown house with holes in the walls. The sister and the husband both worked, leaving no one to look after him during the day. When Spinelli walked into the room, he saw a head, a skull really, lying on a pillow, and below that nothing. His body was so thin the sheets were barely wrinkled.

“I remember you,” the young man said. “I used to see you at the bars.”

The development of an effective treatment for AIDS was still far in the future, and people were trying anything: prayer, acupuncture, bone marrow transfusions, even drinking urine. The man wasting away on the bed was being given chemotherapy, which did nothing except leave him vomiting into a trash can. Spinelli sat next to him and gave what comfort he could, which wasn’t much.

That night, when he got back to the farm he shared with his partner, Spinelli wanted to wash his hands forever, to scrub his skin until it was raw. The window opposite the patient’s bed looked out over a graveyard. In two weeks the young man would be dead; for now, all he could do was gaze out at the rows of tombstones.

“I’m not sure I’m up to this,” Spinelli thought.

The bar
Word on the street in the ’70s was that The Virginian, a popular restaurant that’s been on the Corner since 1923, was gay-friendly. When they moved to town in June of 1976, 24-year-old Joan Schatzman and her girlfriend headed straight there, spotted three lesbians sitting at a table, bought some beers, and sat down.

Despite the promising introduction, Charlottesville was very different from Boston, where Schatzman lived before moving down South. Boston had overt gay bars, gay neighborhoods, even an openly gay state senator in Elaine Noble; Charlottesville had none of these things.

There were places in Charlottesville back then that were gay-friendly, or at least places where gays and lesbians could go and dance and not worry about being bothered. In addition to The Virginian, there was Brianna’s, a jazz club down Route 29 South, Oasis nightclub on 250 East, and the occasional dance at Newcomb Hall put on by UVA’s Gay Student Union. There were other places you could go and dance, but you wouldn’t want to be seen holding hands with your same sex partner.

Schatzman was out and proud when she arrived in Charlottesville, but the same wasn’t true for most of the people she met. Compared to other liberal, college towns, Charlottesville was fairly conservative, with a largely covert gay community hidden amongst the professorial ranks at the University, encountered at upper middle class dinner parties or private gatherings in the county.
“You had to get lucky,” Schatzman said. “And meet somebody who could give you entrée into the fragmented circles.”

The idea of opening a gay bar in Charlottesville seemed crazy to pretty much everyone. It was one thing to hang out together at certain places, to wink and nudge and let whispers carry the word to those who needed to hear it, but opening a place that was just plain gay, no bones about it, was a different story. Everyone in the scene shared the general belief that the redneck hordes gathered just outside the town walls would attack, break the windows, paint the walls with slurs. Everyone except Schatzman.

She quit her job counting bottles at the Pepsi Cola plant, used her severance pay to rent a house just off the Downtown Mall on Water Street, and opened a gay bar called Muldowney’s Pub.

Except it wasn’t a gay bar. It couldn’t be, not in Virginia in 1980. For one thing, the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control had and still has, a problem with bars; if you want to serve alcohol, you must counteract its sinfulness by serving food, so Schatzman found herself becoming an accidental restaurateur.

But the ABC also had a problem with gays. At the time, Section 4-37 of the ABC rules and regulations read: “… a bar’s license may be suspended or revoked if the bar has become a meeting place and rendezvous for users of narcotics, drunks, homosexuals, prostitutes, pimps, panderers, gamblers or habitual law violaters…”

And Section 4-98: “…forbids a licensee from employing any person who has the general reputation as a prostitute, homosexual, panderer, gambler, habitual law violater, person of ill repute, user of or peddler of narcotics, or person who drinks to excess or a ‘B-girl.’”

Although rarely enforced, the rules not only made gay bars illegal in Virginia, they effectively made it illegal for gay people to drink in any bars at all. It wasn’t until a 1991 lawsuit against the ABC forced the matter into a U.S. District Court that the anti-gay regulations were deemed unconstitutional and struck.

Schatzman knew the rules, and while she didn’t advertise Muldowney’s as being gay, every gay person in town knew what it was. She didn’t worry about the possibility that she might be breaking the law. How could anyone prove she was “knowingly” serving homosexuals? Opening the bar, she felt, was a form of civil disobedience.

Muldowney’s was, Schatzman said, “straight ’til eight,” serving turkey sandwiches and Chicago style chili to anyone who came in, with free delivery on the Downtown Mall. But after 8pm, the kitchen closed and the music started, and Muldowney’s became, for all intents and purposes, Charlottesville’s first gay bar. The place was tiny, a dive really, and 50 people were enough to fill it. The restaurant hosted live bands and gay comedians, and there was always a DJ and dancing.

Originally, Schatzman wanted to open a lesbian bar, but Charlottesville didn’t have enough lesbians to make that financially feasible, so Muldowney’s became a place where everyone was equally welcome, gay men and women more equally than others. Charlottesville also had a surprisingly large, but hidden, drag scene, and so Saturday night became drag night. Later, near the end of its run, Muldowney’s began to host punk shows, because like drag queens and gays, Charlottesville’s punks often found themselves without a place to call their own.

There were fights at Muldowney’s, but no gay bashing. The feared redneck hordes never arrived, although some of their members did, surreptitiously, not to gay bash…but to be gay themselves.

The patient
America celebrated its bicentennial in the summer of 1976 with huge parties in every major city. New York’s harbor filled with ships and sailors from all over the world, a moment captured in Randy Shilts’ book And the Band Played On. Shilts theorized that this was when AIDS first arrived on our shores, spreading from the sailors to the men they had sex with on shore, as New York’s thriving gay community threw a giant party, unwittingly toasting the last heady days of innocence.

Blaise Spinelli had been kicked out of his parents house at 19, after a shrink failed to cure his homosexuality with pictures of naked men and a cattle prod, and ended up in Washington, D.C., living in the gay village of Dupont Circle, in a commune with members of the Gay Liberation Front.

For seven years, his life had been a mix of glittering fun and radical politics, but by 1976 most of his friends were heading for San Francisco, and Spinelli was tired of being defined by his sexuality. He was ready for a change, and in the midst of the bicentennial craziness, he found it in a beautiful young man who was in town to celebrate the end of his undergraduate degree at UVA.

“It was one of those magical relationships,” Spinelli said about his time with Michael. “I was 26 years old. I guess it’s always magical when you meet someone when you’re 26.”

Spinelli moved to Michael’s hometown, Charlottesville, a place that seemed to him like it had no gay life at all. But that was O.K. He’d had enough of all that; he had Michael, and they were happy.

When, in 1981, the first reports began to filter in about a new disease that seemed to be targeting gay men, Spinelli took notice. Social activism was part of his fabric, part of life as he knew it growing up in the ’60s and ’70s. He started posting news reports and fliers at Muldowney’s, warning people that there was something going on, something that seemed to be coming after them.

The disease was called GRID at first, Gay Related Immune Deficiency, and although Spinelli and a few of his friends watched with growing interest, most people paid it no attention. There was no test yet, and wouldn’t be until 1985. The only sign was the appearance of rare illnesses in otherwise healthy young men, illnesses that a normal immune system would have easily destroyed but that had begun to mean certain death.

The first cases of AIDS in Charlottesville almost certainly went unrecorded, slipping by as anomalies before anyone knew what to look for. The first known AIDS case at UVA hospital was in May of 1982, making it one of the first in the state. By then, Spinelli was working in the lab at the pathology department, analyzing blood and bodily fluids. When he heard about a formal presentation, or Grand Rounds, on the first local case of the new disease, he made sure to attend. Here it was, this thing he’d been posting warnings about at Muldowney’s. It had finally come to town.

The Grand Rounds was held in one of the hospital theaters, a circle of chairs arranged around a stage where the white-robed chorus of doctors performed their clinical drama. In the old days, the patient might have been on stage with them, but by now the cases were kept anonymous. Even so, Spinelli knew who the patient was. It was a small town, with an even smaller gay scene.
Sitting in the room, he felt afraid.

“This is a time bomb going off here,” he thought. “This is going to be an epidemic.”

There were six known cases of AIDS in Virginia in 1982, four of which were at UVA. Over the next two years, 63 more cases would be reported in Virginia, 11 in Charlottesville.

Afraid to enter patients rooms, hospital workers would leave food trays on the floor outside the door, careful to avoid touching the used forks when they picked them up afterwards. Spinelli didn’t like it, but he understood. People were afraid, because they didn’t know what was happening. No one did.

Spinelli had friends in D.C., California, Texas—friends all over who would call and give reports of the disease in their city, of who was in clinics and who was dying. He called his friend Bob, a lawyer still living in D.C., and told him to be careful. It was a strangely quiet phone call, with Spinelli doing most of the talking. A few days later, Spinelli got the call that Bob was dead; he’d been too ashamed to admit he already had it.

Schatzman started seriously hearing about AIDS around 1984. It was still considered a “gay disease,” something whispered about in fear and shame. Although the first female cases had been reported the year before, they were all contracted via sex with men. It would be awhile before the fear began to spread through the lesbian community. But she realized that the disease was impacting Muldowney’s, as more and more of the men who came to dance began coming down with AIDS. By the end of the ’80s, most of them were dead.

In June of 1985 Schatzman sold Muldowney’s. It had been a lot of fun, and she was proud of what she’d created. But being a restaurant owner had never been her dream. Several months later, Spinelli got the call from Hospice of the Piedmont about the AIDS patient they didn’t think they could handle.

If they couldn’t, who could? There was no outside group to act as advocates for the victims, many of whom had been disowned by their families. Others hadn’t even told their families they were gay yet, let alone that they were dying. How do you make that phone call? “Mom, dad, I have to tell you something. And then I have to tell you something else …”

That winter, when Spinelli went to see the hospice patient—saw his skeletal body under the sheets, saw the tombstones outside the window—he was frightened. But he was also angry. He and Michael got together with Jim Heilman and Wynne Stuart, and the four of them created the Aids Services Group of Charlottesville.

ASG began with 13 people meeting at Muldowney’s, including members of the Gay Men’s Health Clinic in D.C. who’d agreed to train its nascent staff. Every week the number grew as UVA students, local doctors, and others showed up wanting to volunteer. By July of 1987, ASG was officially recognized by the state of Virginia, with Kathy Drabkin as its first director and 75 clients from Charlottesville and the surrounding counties. In the first year, the budget increased from $1,000 to $100,000. By 1989, ASG had 75 volunteers and a permanent staff of six. That year, the number of U.S. AIDS cases reached 100,000.

AIDS is a thread that winds back through all of modern gay life. It very nearly destroyed the gay community, but the fight against it made the community stronger than ever before. Before AIDS, gay pride meant sexual freedom and a public identity; afterwards it meant political activism, as the focus shifted away from the fight to define a lifestyle, towards a fight for the right to live, and in many cases, to die with dignity.

In a way it was AIDS that made marriage equality the central issue it is today.

Getting married had always been something straight people did, and being queer and proud of it meant rebelling against the straight world as much as possible. But then came this plague, and gays found themselves turned away from their partner’s hospital rooms, watching as their loved one’s property was taken by the same families that had previously disowned them.

Peter DeMartino moved to Charlottesville from Palm Springs, California, in 2010 to take over as executive director of AIDS Services Group of Charlottesville, a nonprofit that served 1,409 people in 2011, 83 percent of whom were H.I.V.-negative, and only 36 percent of whom were men having sex with men. Photo: Billy Hunt

ASG was the model for all other AIDS groups in the state. With a budget currently over a million dollars, it covers what’s called the Thomas Jefferson Health district: Charlottesville/Albemarle, Fluvanna, Greene, Louisa and Nelson, but also Staunton, Waynesboro, Harrisonburg, and wherever else it’s needed.

The Centers for Disease Control estimates that out of every group of 100 people with H.I.V., only 28 are on meds and receiving steady treatment. The rest are wandering through the wilderness of modern health care, perhaps getting some treatment, perhaps getting none. Twenty out of every 100 are lost completely, unaware that they carry the virus. There are roughly 1,000 people in ASG’s immediate area with H.I.V. or AIDS, and ASG is actively engaged with about 225 of them. That’s only 23 percent being treated, below the CDC’s national average of 28 percent. ASG’s ever-elusive goal is to reach those 775 remaining people.

“I was talking to a younger gay guy recently,” said Peter DeMartino, the current executive director of ASG. “And I started talking about the history of AIDS and the history of ASG, and he was like, ‘Wow. Thank you for sharing that.’ I was like, ‘You’re 30, you really don’t know this?’ and he was like, ‘No.’”

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News

What does George Huguely’s sentence say about the way we punish killers?

In Norway last Friday, Anders Breivik was sentenced to 22 years in prison for killing 77 people and wounding 242. Six days later I sat in court and watched as George Huguely’s jury-recommended sentence of 26 years for the murder of one woman, Yeardley Love, was reduced to 23 years. American prison sentences start big and then dwindle as the years go by. With time served and good behavior, Huguely could be free in 20 years. Norwegian law does the opposite, starting small and adding time if a person remains a danger to society.

Breivik is unlikely to ever get out alive, but still, the fact that his original state-mandated penance is less than Huguely’s only reinforces my belief that trying to quantify the consequences of our actions is nonsensical. Outside of the courtroom, there’s no such thing as moral mathematics.

The New York Times reported that Norwegians as a whole were happy with Breivik’s sentence, even parents who’d lost children in the attack. Norway, it seems, views prison as an opportunity for rehabilitation, while in America it’s seen as a vehicle for retribution. Ever since the Huguely trial ended, I’ve wondered what good can possibly come from sticking a damaged young man in a tiny cell with only his anger to keep him company. It’s a deterrent, I guess. We think Norwegians are soft on crime, but then they barely have any crime. We’re the ones who wake up every morning to news of a new mass shooting.

A lone member of the jury that convicted Huguely was in court for the sentencing, sitting unnoticed at the back of the room. After it was over, I asked him what he thought, and he replied that although he wouldn’t have complained if Judge Edward Hogshire had upheld the jury’s recommendation, he felt the decision was fair.

“Are you glad it’s all over?”

“I don’t think it will ever be over.”

No, it ain’t over yet. Not by a long shot.

Two months after the trial ended, Yeardley Love’s mother Sharon filed a $30.5 million lawsuit against George Huguely and a $29.45 million suit against the State of Virginia, UVA men’s lacrosse Head Coach Dom Starsia, Assistant Coach Marc Van Arsdale, and Athletics Director Craig Littlepage.

By my count, Huguely is known to have attacked four different UVA athletes in the years leading up to Yeardley Love’s death, including one teammate, and yet no one, not the coaches who saw him every day, or the administrators who ran the athletic department, took any disciplinary action. This, in a nutshell, is the thrust of the lawsuit: Everybody knew George was violent, yet nobody did anything about it.

The defense, meanwhile, busied themselves over the summer with an extensive campaign of legal whinging, meant either to secure a new trial or to have the results of the old one overturned. It was pro forma argument at best, desperate and laughable at worst. A colleague who’d been with me in court for the whole affair asked in an e-mail what the defense could possibly be thinking. Even if the judge had granted a retrial, he wondered, did anyone think it would have ended differently?

Nothing I saw during sentencing dispelled the general air of incompetence given off by Huguely’s lawyers, especially Fran Lawrence, who often seemed like he’d just woken up and found himself in court.

Last Thursday, Huguely’s family and friends took the stand and told us about George’s essential goodness, but their testimonies consisted entirely of vague clichés (he was loyal, kind, a leader) and incoherent stories (he helped a kid finish a jigsaw puzzle, he stopped someone from falling/jumping out of a car), and were not only unconvincing, but utterly disconnected from the reality at hand.

Huguely’s lawyers had their strategy all wrong. The time to show us his humanity was during the trial. Nobody was ever going to be convinced of his innocence; what we needed to believe in was his tragedy. Instead, they minimized and belittled the damage done to Love in a misguided effort to convince us that Huguely didn’t really kill her.

The way the Love family looked at Huguely each day in court made it clear they were after retribution. Lawrence and co-counsel Rhonda Quagliana made the mistake of trying to prove that they didn’t deserve it. They should have let the prosecution win that point and redirected the discussion towards the idea of rehabilitation. Watching the videotaped interview made the morning he was arrested, seeing Huguely break down when he was told Love was dead; that was the best stuff they had. It was the only convincing evidence that Love’s death was in any way accidental, and the only sign that Huguely was anything other than a pair of fists and an overworked liver.

Back during the trial, as I sat in court listening to descriptions of Love’s battered body and watching Huguely stare dumbly at the nightmare that was his new reality, I invariably found myself thinking of a line from Dylan Thomas: After the first death there is no other. Anders Breivik will live out his days in a three room suite of a cell equipped with exercise equipment, a TV, and a laptop. One survivor of his rampage called this cushy treatment a sign that Norway was a civilized nation.

“If [Breivik] is deemed not to be dangerous any more after 21 years, then he should be released,” the man said. “That’s how it should work. That’s staying true to our principles, and the best evidence that he hasn’t changed our society.”

George Huguely won’t be treated so well, but then nothing about this case is going to change American society either. After the first death there is no other, I tell myself, but I know that it’s a lie. Every violent death feels like the first death, and in America, all you have to do is wait a while. It’s guaranteed that there will be another one coming.

Categories
Living

The wonder years: How real estate and gentrification changed Belmont for good

“One big problem is change. [The older residents] don’t understand change is happening and why it’s happening, and sometimes I don’t understand it myself.” – Jimmy Dettor, lifelong Belmont resident. From the documentary, Still Life With Donuts.

When she arrived in Charlottesville in the summer of 1976, Joan Schatzman didn’t think of herself as a pioneer. She was 24, fresh out of college, and when her best friend Debbie decided to go to grad school at UVA, she went along for the ride.

Initially they rented an apartment near Grounds, but in the spring of 1978, Joan, Debbie, and another friend decided to buy a house across town in an old, run-down neighborhood called Belmont.

“Belmont?” people said. “You can’t live in Belmont!”

“Why?”

“Nothing but trouble there.”

“What trouble?” Schatzman wondered. She’d grown up on the south side of Chicago; what was so scary about a sleepy Southern town? The only problem she could see was that the residents were kind of racist, but she didn’t think they’d bother her. Besides, the house was so cheap, $14,500 for a three bedroom place on Levy Avenue where the mortgage split three ways was cheaper than rent anywhere else in town.

In 2005, 27 years later, houses in Belmont were routinely selling for over $400,000. The neighborhood was hip, “the SoHo of Charlottesville,” “one of America’s Best Secret Neighborhoods.” Schatzman still lived there. In the intervening years she’d bought out her roommates, sold the house on Levy, and purchased four houses on nearby Douglas Avenue.

Buy the house, fix the house, sell the house. The bourgeois American dream.

Belmont’s change from a neighborhood the tonier set studiously avoided, to one where they got into bidding wars, seemed strange to people watching from the outside; if you were caught up in the madness, it could be kind of terrifying. One of Schatzman’s neighbors paid $450,000 for his house, and as both reality and panic set in, he anxiously asked Schatzman if she thought he’d paid too much.

There was a class Schatzman remembered from college titled “Urban Geography,” which she explained to me like this: “Cities go through cycles. There’s a central business district and there’s rings around it where the rich people live, so they can walk downtown. And then as they get more affluent, they want to move a little further out… The inner ring of fine, nice, beautiful homes now becomes devalued.”

It wasn’t because she was rich that Schatzman had been able to buy so many houses in Belmont. She wasn’t rich, she was in the right place at the right time, able to recognize an area filled with well-built, undervalued properties.

“I kind of identified Belmont as a place at the bottom of its cycle,” she said. “And I thought, ‘You know what? I’m gonna kill myself to buy. Whatever it takes, I’ll tighten the belt.”

Which is exactly what she did.

Until 2005, when something told her that things were going to change. The market was peaking, it was time to get out of the game. She sold two of her houses and rented out the third.

And then her new neighbor went and bought his house for $450,000 and asked her if he’d paid too much.

What she said was, “No,” but what she was thinking was, “Heck, yeah.”

Hitting bottom

“This is a rough neighborhood. The police are almost scared to get out of their cars.”—anonymous man in front of Belmont Market, The Daily Progress, 1984

“Belmont has had a boo-hiss-hiss, God-you-live-there? Reputation.” —Pat Weis, Belmont resident, The Daily Progress, 1990

In 1980 a handful of Belmont business owners and residents, determined to fight the “growing adolescent youth problem,” hired off-duty cops to patrol the small commercial section along Monticello Road at night. Spearheading the project was Bill Lanier, a self-described eccentric and entrepreneur who, despite having lived in the neighborhood for less than a year, claimed to be the unofficial “Mayor of Belmont.”

The patrols were not cheap, Lanier told the Daily Progress, but they were worth it. Local store owners, he said, were worried about more than their businesses; they were worried about their community.

It was nothing new, this sense of  worry. Around 1960, most Belmont residents began to feel like their neighborhood was changing for the worse. As older homeowners died off, commercial landlords began buying their houses to convert into cheap rental units. By the end of the 1970’s, rentals outnumbered owner-occupied houses and the neighborhood’s reputation had become one of crime and neglect.

The Charlottesville Department of Community Development sent out  a memo in September of 1979 to announce the creation of a Belmont neighborhood association. Around 100 Belmont residents showed up, only to be told that the memo had been sent by mistake; there were no current plans to set up a neighborhood group, the purpose of the meeting was simply to let residents speak their minds. And speak they did, telling Community Development head (now Mayor) Satyendra Huja about the problems they saw destroying their neighborhood: vandalism, drugs, neglected rental properties that were starting to decay, and most of all, “loitering juveniles.”

Where were the cops when you needed them?

According to the police, they were in Belmont, one of the most heavily patrolled areas in the city, even though its crime rate was no higher than anywhere else. The biggest problems cops faced in Belmont were drunken fights and domestic disputes, and unless they actually committed a crime, there wasn’t much they could do about kids hanging out.

John DeK. Bowen, Charlottesville’s chief of police at the time, blamed the tensions in Belmont on the fact that the neighborhood was changing from an all-white, owner-occupied neighborhood, to a racially mixed neighborhood with a lot of renters. It’s hard to see what was mixed about it. Belmont in 1980 was 90 percent white (the rest of the city was more like 75 percent). When it came to race, it was everything around Belmont that was changing.

Between 1979 and 1981, three public housing projects opened up just beyond Belmont’s borders: Garrett Square (now Friendship Court), Sixth Street, and South First Street. Where Belmont was mostly white, the projects were almost entirely black, and as Joan Schatzman remembers it, the two groups rarely crossed over into each other’s territory.

A 1980 report by the city on conditions in Belmont noted that “[m]any residents fear that the changing nature of the Belmont area has had a negative impact upon local youth, leading to increased vandalism, drug use and general delinquency.” But the report also said that things were starting to get better. The number of rentals was leveling off and the number of homeowners rising again. The Department of Community Development said that Belmont was in a “transition phase.”

Bill Lanier didn’t need an official report to tell him things were changing; he was out there making it happen. There were the police patrols, the shirts he was selling that said “Beautiful Downtown Belmont” and the Belmont Community Fair he’d organized that year.

“Free Chicken! Free Ice Cream! Live Bands!” the poster promised.

But Lanier’s interest went beyond community PR. Where most people saw a dilapidated corner of the city, he saw dollar signs. Lanier bought two houses in Belmont and flipped both for a tidy profit, deals that helped him to facilitate the purchase of three commercial buildings for a group of investors from Northern Virginia. The dollar figures involved were nothing compared to what they’d be later, but “The Mayor of Belmont” had seen the future, and the future was good.

“Three years ago to say that any house in Belmont was worth more than $35,000 was a joke,” he told the Daily Progress. “Now you can see a relatively new Jaguar go down the street in Belmont and pull into a driveway.”

Categories
Living

Meet the man who’s quietly bringing ancient Tibet to Charlottesville

Gyaltsen Sangpo Druknya was born in the northeast corner of the Tibetan Plateau in a region called Amdo, a land of arid grasslands, huge blue lakes, and deep, pine covered valleys. Three of Asia’s most famous rivers—the Yangtze, the Yellow, and the Mekong—have their beginnings in the snow-covered mountains that ring the area. Amdo is the birthplace of the current Dalai Lama, and a quarter of the Tibetan population, about 1.6 million people, live there, despite the fact that it lies outside of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, largely subsumed by the Chinese province of Quinghai.

The village where he was born is home to about 500 families. Like 80 percent of the Tibetans in Amdo, they’re traditional nomadic farmers, raising yaks, goats, and sheep on the steppes of the highest and largest plateau on earth.

Gyaltsen’s first name is pronounced like “Jyultson,” but he tells everybody to just say “Jensen” and leave it at that. His last name is familiar as the name of the Downtown Mall hair salon, Salon Druknya, which he co-owns with Tashi, his wife of seven years. They have two kids, a 7-year-old son, Namkia, and a daughter, Chukyi, who is 6. He’s a happy, successful man, but he just can’t seem to relax and enjoy it.

“My personality likes keeping busy,” he said. “That’s why my wife complains.” What keeps Gyaltsen busy is a lifelong interest in traditional Tibetan medicine and a consuming desire to do whatever he can to help his homeland. Last year, he founded a nonprofit company called Arura Medicine of Tibet, with the sole aim of bringing traditional Tibetan medicine to the U.S. Every Sunday and every Monday is spent working towards this goal—and every other spare moment he’s not in the salon. All his spare money is going to that venture too, and he’s not getting paid for the work. But that’s O.K., he’s not in it for the money. And that’s why his wife nags him. “She says, ‘If you spent all your energy on [the hair salon], you and I by now don’t have to work.’”

Tibetan medicine is old. Some say 1,200 years old, others say 6,000 years, but it’s old. In fact, the first international medical conference was held in Tibet in the 7th century, and there’s evidence of Tibetan doctors performing brain surgery way before the current era.

But the ancient tradition has been seriously modernized. Arura Tibetan Medicine Group is a state-financed (read: Chinese Government) company that includes a Tibetan pharmaceutical company (worth $62.5 million in 2006), Tibetan Medical Hospital, Tibetan medical school, Tibetan Medical Research Institute, and the Museum of Tibetan Medicine and Culture, all under one umbrella and all in the Amdo region. If the medicine is holistic, so is the business.

Gyaltsen left Tibet at 18 and went to school in India before setting up a business selling rugs and gems, splitting his time between India and Nepal. Later, he traveled to Singapore, Hong Kong, and lived for a year in Taiwan. In 2001, the then 27-year-old went to visit his sister in Charlottesville, where she was living with her husband. His third day here, a woman asked him if he was going to stay in America permanently. “If you find a horse for me,” said the Tibetan nomad, “I will stay here.” The next day she called his bluff and took him out to Braeburn horse training center in Crozet. As soon as he got on a horse, he was hired, and for the next two years he trained horses for a living.

But then in 2003, Gyaltsen was in a bad car accident. His face was filled with broken glass and needed numerous stitches and his back was so badly damaged he couldn’t work at the horse farm anymore. Taking the bad luck in stride, he decided to open a restaurant. He had no experience as a cook, mind you, but his father owns restaurants in India and Nepal, and he thought he might be able to make it work.

When he first arrived in 2001, Gyaltsen met Tashi, also Tibetan, through the town’s small Tibetan community. She was cutting hair at Carden Salon on the Downtown Mall, and owner John Carden started helping Gyaltsen look for a location for the restaurant. While he looked, he fell back on what he’d done before, selling gemstones from India and Nepal on the Downtown Mall. John asked him if he might want to try cutting hair.

“I thought, ‘No way.’ I have this wild personality,” he said.

But after almost two years with no luck, John asked again. Why not, Gyaltsen thought. He could set his own hours and keep looking for something else. But he turned out to be pretty good at the hair-cutting thing, and in 2005, after only three months on the job, John asked if he and Tashi wanted to buy the business.

“That’s probably [what made] me stay as a hairdresser,” Gyaltsen said. Except for his time at the Horse Center, he’d never worked for other people, he’d always done his own thing.

“I always had a feeling to help Tibet, inside Tibet. I want to do something. …I feel like just work here is not satisfying the goal [I had] when I left home.”

When Dr. O Tsokchen, the head of Arura Group, came to Charlottesville in 2008, it was because he’d heard that a guy named Gyaltsen Druknya had been holding numerous successful fundraisers for the Tibetan Healing Fund, a group working to improve the health and living conditions of women and children in rural Tibet. Dr. O asked him to spearhead the efforts to bring Arura Medicine to the U.S., but Gyaltsen wasn’t interested. He wanted to help Tibet, not America.

Still, he began visiting American medical facilities and talking to doctors and nurses at UVA, and he started to see that not only could Tibetan medicine be a big boon to America, bringing the “mindfulness part of medicine,” but coming to America could also help Tibetan medicine.

“All the hard work, and what they did inside Tibet, if we establish some new place here in America, could be preserved.”

So when Dr. O came back in 2009, Gyaltsen said yes. And then he proposed holding a Tibetan Medicine conference in Charlottesville.

“You sure you can do it?” Dr. O asked.

“Why not?” Gyaltsen said.

Last year, Gyaltsen started Arura Medicine of Tibet. They’ve got a Board of Advisors that includes Jeffrey Hopkins, professor emeritus in UVA’s religion department, the man who built the Tibetan Buddhist Studies program and served as translator for the Dalai Lama for 10 years. They work with numerous Tibetan groups, as well as with the UVA School of Nursing, the UVA Tibetan Center, and the newly minted UVA Contemplative Science Center.

And they need big partners, because they have big plans. The goal is to build a Tibetan Medical Shangri La here in Charlottesville, with a training center, old folks’ home, museum, medical library, meditation hall, Tibetan marketplace, and a Tibetan inn.

I ask Gyaltsen what he does other than cut hair and work on Tibetan causes.

“That’s my wife’s complaint,” he says. But then he thinks a bit and says, “I like bars. I go to bars a little bit.”

He admits that perhaps less of his energy goes into the salon than it should, but his wife and employees keep the place running well, while his heart and mind are with his passion project.

Both he and Tashi are U.S. citizens. Gyaltsen made the leap just last year in a small, unobtrusive ceremony at the Federal courthouse Downtown. He had the option to do it at Monticello, but he didn’t want to make it a big deal.

“Anyway,” he says, “I’m a citizen of the world, yeah?”