The Return of the Queen

COMING INTO SHOCKOE BOTTOM FROM OUT OF TOWN, YOU HAD TO TAKE THE FRANKLIN STREET EXIT FROM I-95 SOUTH, and then make an immediate left turn at Dianastein. Dianastein was the name Hippie John gave the giant portrait of Princess Diana that Ed Trask painted on the big blank Main-Street-facing wall of Club Velvet. It was an exact likeness of Princess Diana, except for her nose, which was disproportionately large in a way that Hippie John believed couldn’t have been accidental. According to him, Dianastein was the only culturally accurate symbol of Richmond Virginia, which was and has always been a city of pimps and would-be gentlemen, and of princesses and whores.

Those directions into the Bottom don’t work any more. Dianastein is gone, and the Franklin Street exit got shifted a couple of blocks to the west to accommodate the third in a trio of matching monuments erected to commemorate the horrors of slavery: the other two monuments stand in Liverpool, England, and in Benin, West Africa. Club Velvet is gone now, too, replaced by something cleaner, and with it, the big twin WW-II-era rooftop Klieg lights that used to finger the skies above town in search of phantom zeppelins.

The removal of Dianastein was just a nuance of the city’s grander gesture of bending down and puckering up for the arrival of the Queen, who promised to attend the four-hundredth-anniversary celebration of how the Commonwealth of Virginia was discovered by Englishmen; descendants of their former slaves and servants, dressed in work boots and day-glo vests and yellow resin helmets, descended on the river bottom in a mechanized division of cherry pickers, cranes and bucket loaders, moving from project to project like a swarm of Japanese hornets. First, they painted over Dianastein; they painted the whole wall just as black as the space among the stars in about the time it took most people to fix breakfast. Then, the street sweepers crawled the grid between Main and Broad Streets, gradually foambrushing the cobblestones free of twenty years worth of urine, spilled beer, vomit and dumpster nectar. Men on foot walked the alleys, gathering litter with telescopic boom grabbers; Siebert’s Towing liberated the abandoned vehicles, and even a few that weren’t abandoned; cops harassed the lingering winos, weed dealers and journeyman junkies, including ones who had become Richmond institutions and, as such, were considered part of the essential furniture of Shockoe Bottom. Finally, the city called in the heavy earth-moving machines to relocate the incoming Franklin Street exit ramp from I-95 South, in order to free space for the new slavery reconciliation statue. That operation snarled traffic for more than a week on East Main Street through Shockoe Bottom. Even Dancin’ Pops, the one resident of the Bottom who was terminally pedestrian, could feel the deep significance of the changes . . .

Dancin’ Pops was the undisputed Mayor of Shockoe Bottom. His Christian name was Kenny Green, but everyone in The Bottom, and in Richmond at large, knew him as Dancin’ Pops, a nickname he earned for the ecstatic, mantis-style karate ballet he employed to direct traffic through the intersection of 18^thand Franklin at night on the weekends, or whenever the spirit moved him. Sometimes a city has a voice, a voice unconnected to microphones and news cameras, unconnected to any office or policy or project or status or lineage, a single human voice that weaves all of the other disparate comic/tragic voices of the city together the same way nature causes Purple Martins to fly in synergistic formation, to cease being merely a flock of birds and to become something even more beautiful. Dancin’ Pops was that voice in Shockoe Bottom, so much so that there were moments when it seemed as if the architects and masons who rebuilt Richmond after the Civil War had been able to foretell his birth somehow, and had planned their work accordingly, with the register of his voice in mind, placing each wall and alley and archway and portico just so, to maximize the carriage of its echo. It was among the sounds you expected to hear in Shockoe Bottom, and if you were a full-time resident of Noneshuch, the sudden absence of Pops’ voice could be enough to put you on edge.  He’d arrive like a mellifluous melody rising from the distance, a progression of notes indistinguishable from pure music except for the stops and the poetic cadence of his rap rising and falling in Doppler, drawing closer and closer until the language became discernible again . . .

“Man, they tearin’ Main Street all to hell!” he bellowed to the boys on the wall outside the Franklin Street Supermarket on the morning of the big fireworks show. “I saw ‘em paintin’ Club Velvet, too; paintin’ up Dianastein. What the fuck’s goin’ on?”

“The Queen’s comin,’ Pops,” Hippie John said. “Didn’t you hear?”

Hippie John was a journeyman junkie, a relic from the ‘60s who squatted on the third floor of the Kholig Box factory; you could see the revolution still smoldering in his eyes, which were a piercing, iridescent grayish blue, and which sparkled out at you like piscean cenotes beneath the jungly twin hedgebanks he had for eyebrows. He wore a shaggy, unkempt beard and mustache, too; he looked how Santa Claus would have looked if he had drifted down into the Yucatan in his twenties on a vision quest that never paid off.

“Say whut?”

“The Queen’s coming.”

Pops thought about that for a second. He furrowed his brow. “The Queen … From Godfrey’s?”

“Naaaw, man, the Queen of England. The Queen Queen . . The Queen.”

“Buuuull shit. You mean the one that look like George Washington?”

“That’s the one!”

Pops pondered the gravity of the news. “Jeeeeesus Christ almighty. What in the world she comin’ herefuh? What the fuck she want wiff little ol’ us?”

“She’s here for the anniversary of Jamestown,” Hippie John said. Then, as an afterthought, “And to present Dirt Woman with the keys to the city of London.”

“Do whut,now?!”

It had occurred to Hippie John that the Queen would likely sit for an audience with all of the local dignitaries except one – Dirt Woman. That seemed like a damn shame, and, by Hippie John’s estimation, a waste of a fine opportunity to foster a more honest dialogue between the sister cities; just two Queens, kickin’ it.

“After all,” Hippie said, “Dirt Woman’s the only real queen this town’s ever had.”

“Sheeeeit …” Pops said. “I know that’s right.”

“The paper said she left the country yesterday,” Hippie John said, “… the Queen, y’know? … but she’s actually still in town. I have it on good authority that she’s been shopping for property on Monument Avenue, and later on she’s gonna watch the fireworks from the deck of a small yacht docked off Rockett’s Landing. Incognito, man, just like Zeus among the hoi polloi.”

“Dirt Woman?”

“No, man, the Queen … She’s gonna be in disguise.”

“How anybody gonna know who she is, then?”

“They’re not, Pops; that’s the whole point. It’s like … like when Michael Jackson goes shopping, you know? And he doesn’t want all the fans mobbing him and shit, so he leaves the glove at home with the parachute pants and hat. It’s the same thing.”

Pops frowned. “No, it ain’t, man. Not really . . but I feel you.”

“I think we should prepare some kind of gift for her, you know? A nice tribute.”

“Yeahhh … that’s a good idea. I’m down. How we gonna give it to her, though, man? If we can’t tell who she is?”

“We’ll think of something,” Hippie John said. “I bet Nightfly’ll have some ideas.”

“If he don’t,” Pops said, “he might have somethin’ good to smoke.”

It took them less than half an hour to awaken and then to recruit Nightfly, the Bottom’s resident bush pharmacist, and to reintroduce the topic of finding a tribute for the Queen. He did, in fact, have something good to smoke, and they sat in a triangle around the picnic table in the courtyard under the Mulberry tree behind Zuppa, smoking it: Nightfly didn’t have any immediate ideas; happily, though, he had half a sheet of fresh blotter acid, part of which they enjoyed for brunch with a beer from his secret cooler stashed under the interior courtyard stairwell.

“They used to give vising royalty a deer … a buck … the Pamunkeys did,” Hippie John said.

“Do we look like some fuckin’ indians?” Pops said. “Where the fuckwe gonna find a deer down here in Shockoe Bottom? And us trippin?”

“There’s plenty on the north bank,” Nightfly said. “Right along the canal locks, man. I’ve seen ‘em at Texas Beach, too, sometimes when I forage shrooms. You gotta go early in the morning, though. And yeah . . it’s bad to hunt tripping.”

“It doesn’t have to be a deer,” Hippie John said. “It just has to be something meaningful.”

“Like …”

“Like what?”

Dylan the line cook joined them presently, on a cigarette break from his shift on the grill at Zuppa. He couldn’t help overhearing.

“They used to give Beaver pelts, I think,” he said. Dylan was a real problem solver; he was a junkie, so every day he solved the same daily problem. He came factory wired for problem resolution; he really knew how to keep his thinking cap on tight.

“If you can find a beaver between here and the Bay,” Hippie John said, “Man, I swear I’ll …” and he drifted off internally, in search of some appropriately dire assurance. He heard a noise in the tree above him, and tilted his head back to see what it was. High in the canopy of the Mulberry tree, a Cardinal hidden somewhere in the whorled kaleidoscope of canopy sang out three times and stopped; the sun washed across the tops of the branches like warm butterscotch icing, lacing the edges of the leaves with little diamonds where dew lingered from an early-morning rain. The entire universe smelled like bacon and hamburgers grilling, as if all of Shockoe Bottom were having a neighborhood bar-b-que …

“You’ll what?” Pops said.

“Shit, I don’t know, man . . .” Hippie John said. “Be pretty freaked out … I imagine … faaaar ouuuut …”

The acid had started to register. Twenty minutes later, all of their communication became monosyllabic and gesticular. An hour later, they were no closer to thinking of a tribute for the Queen that would be properly meaningful. It wasn’t that they had abandoned their loftier goals for the day; it was that they had discovered a willingness to approach those goals circuitously, with a measure of creativity and wit, if not outright hilarity: thus re-oriented, they made their way back into the open glare of summertime in Shockoe Bottom, to find inspiration for a proper tribute with which to mark the return of the Queen – the one who looked like George Washington.

It was almost four o’clock, and the early happy-hour and dinner crowd had begun to trickle in; suburban dilettantes walked along the cobblestone lanes in their matching family units: men forced artificially-confident, bank-teller smiles; women grimaced, fidgeting through poorly-suppressed waves of moral panic; children in matching spandex and fleece clustered around their parents’ legs in slack-jawed amazement . . .

“Look at the silly man, Daddy!”

“Yes, he’s a very silly man. Come along, now, sweetie. Don’t touch anything, Ok?”

The questing knights made their way up and down 18^th Street, assembling costumes on the fly from donated items and found objects: their booty comprised three discarded party hats, a magenta boa and three pink-and-purple leis from a dumpster behind Tiki Bob’s, whose parking lot had been the setting of a tiki-lounge-themed wedding reception (the bride had selected a pink-and-magenta color scheme) just the day before; Dylan, who had self-emancipated from the afternoon shift at Zuppa with a well-timed but poorly-excused three-strip of LSD, turned a headless mop stick into a Drum Major’s mace, to the top of which he secured the jingle bells that Dancin’ Pops swiped from the front door of the Franklin Supermarket when Jimmy the manager’s back was turned. Pops wore a bright geen-and-white jester’s hat that he borrowed from Nightfly, and a Polynesian-print collared shirt with big pot leaves printed on it that he won rolling dice with Rasta Jon. They resembled a union of failed clowns, or a trap house of successful ones; thus festooned, they prowled the neighborhood with a renewed sense of glee and amiable purposelessness.

They were irrepressibly joyful. First, they played hide-and-seek with the new surveillance cameras that the city had installed on the light post at the intersection of 18^thand Franklin, popping out from behind parked cars like clownish Jacks in-the-box to moon it, or to flip it the bird. Then, when they got bored with that game, they serenaded Tom the philanthropist, who eventually, and against all better judgment, lowered them down a thermos of gin (that he had left over from a fundraiser he organized to support the Richmond Ballet) and a stack of little red halo cups from his second-story apartment window above Zuppa. By and by, they were joined by Rob the Pitcher, too, and James and the Three Wise Men, who doubtless smelled the gin all the way from their spot on the wall across the intersection at the Franklin Supermarket, and they all drank gin and took turns playing Town Crier up and down Franklin Street while the fat old sun dipped behind Union Market Hill, electroplating copper rainbows along the edges of the rapids on the James River Falls.

By that time, the boys still hadn’t decided on an appropriate tribute for the Queen, though their cohort grew steadily by the hour as they made their way through Shockoe Bottom soliciting advice and good cheer from men and women of influence in the village, many of whom, having no useful advice but also no dearth of enthusiasm for the spirit of their cause, simply dropped some acid and joined them in their circuitous soft parade up to Libby Hill Park: Chris Skinner and Dylan and Cheris came from Zuppa, and Mindy and Trixie the hairdresser, as did Jimmy the Manager and Hector the Market Attendant; Leon the butcher came, and Jeremy and the crew from RecRoom Recording studios; even the Hell’s Satans Moped Gang were in attendance that night, and fringe elements of the Fulton Hill anarchist collective, though they arrived by markedly disparate vectors.

As sunset lit the great chrome cantiliever at the top of City Hall, the troupe started slowly up Church Hill, an accidental confederacy of food-service freaks, freelance shaman and street poets dancing in a loose procession up Franklin Street from the land of Dianastein; they were the newly dispossessed children of Nonesuch, adrift now without a Princess or even a decent tribute for her replacement Queen, all oblivious to how that night might manifest, in retrospect, as a semi-colon scrawled across the sky in smoke and glittering ash, to mark a sort of beginning to the end of something unique that had yet to even be clearly defined. The panicked urgency of rush hour was long gone, its energy supplanted by an anticipation you could taste on the air, a composite scent gathered from the ceiling vents of a hundred grills in a hundred bisque-steamed kitchens, from the oily roach ends of a hundred smoldering honey-brushed blunts gesticulating blue arabesques into the rooftop crosswinds and balcony breezes of Nonesuch; from the co-mingled smudge-bundle vapors of the unseen Medicine Woman, the ancestral clan mother of Flat Rocky Place, Grandmother Shockoe herself . . .

The questing knights and their throng of merrymakers made a loose procession up Franklin Street to Libbie Hill Park with Dancin’ Pops high-stepping the non-cadence out front, carrying aloft his makeshift royal jingle-bell staff, thrusting it skyward in perfect time with the rhythm of a march only he could hear, and Hippie John cavorting all about like some vernal Lord of Misrule, twirling a fence post re-purposed as a baton, yelling:

“God Saaave the Queeeen! Heaaaar yeeee, heaaaar yeeee! God save the Queeeeeen!”

Behind their procession, in the near distance above the rooftops across 18^thStreet, the Art Deco towers of financial Richmond loomed, devoid now of all dimension, flattened by dusk back to the basic elegant shapes of shadow obelisks ascending the distant hills like so many steps on a giant staircase to nowhere, forms snatched intact from the most colorless dreams of the most cynical, industrial-era capitalists, arranged now against this twilight’s powder-blue luminescence like seasonal cutouts tacked to a kindergarten bulletin board.  Above their jagged horizon, ten-thousand Purple Martins coalesced to form a single purple dragon that was a city block in length and made long, low arcs that dipped to street level over the 17^thStreet farmer’s market before corkscrewing up, up, up to surf the thermoclines radiating up from the crumbled-chimney wetlands and CSX yards past the Lumpkin jail site and the unmarked slave cemetery beneath the convergence of I-95 and I-64.

The merry company processed up the hill out of Nonesuch, behind the convent wall and then through the park, toward the Confederate Naval monument and the steps on the river bank below Libbie Hill, where all of suburban Richmond had gathered from the Fan and the West End and the western soul-killing monotony of Short Pump for the big 400th-anniversary fireworks show. Hippie John selected a spot on the grass in the meadow for the questing knights, a place where he imagined Poe himself might have chosen, away from where the crowds packed together on the steps, where no one else wanted to sit because of how the trees obscured the view of the river from that angle.

“This,” he said, “is perfect.”

“What about all the branches?” Pops said. “Won’t the trees be all in the waya nd shit?”

“It’ll be beautiful,” Hippie John said. “You’ll see. The trees will give it imperfection … it’ll be really … Japanese …. you know?, with the flares floating down among the branches? It’ll be beautiful! You’ll see …”

They all agreed that it was worth a try, if only to avoid the crowds, who had packed in tight along the hillside in the radiant heat of the stone steps beneath the naval monument, front to back like a herd of pack animals; and as the fireworks dropped incandescent lotus blossoms that floated slowly down through the canopies of the oaks along the cusp of Church Hill like paper lanterns in Japanese paintings, the band of knights-errant stretched out on the cool turf along the hillside to watch the show, each of them suddenly serene in the knowledge – without any of them ever even having to say so – that they themselves were the appropriately meaningful tribute they had been looking for all along.