The Mythmaker of Montgomery: Two conversations w/ Jeremy Adkins Jr.
I speak with the hermetic artist born and raised in Montgomery, West Virginia
Montgomery
One Saturday in April I drove east on Rt. 60, the Midland Trail, towards Fayette County to see the affect of consistent rain on the New River. The waterway is heralded as the second oldest on earth, and one of very few which flows North. It eventually feeds the Kanawha river on which I live and I decided for all the time I spent on the banks of the damn thing I ought to know its roots.
I wound the historic roadway, between smoky hills and past the remnants of once-bustling towns which owe a debt and an anger to King Coal. I passed small mountains of the black rock waiting for the work-week to begin, waiting to be loaded into the trains and barges which float dutifully by, ten a day, to carry wealth and pain away from this world and into the Ohio River.
After a day in the Gorge I make my way back home, back past the Kanawha Falls, the London Locks & Dam, by illegible graves and between low clouds which don’t move, just perch real still in the crannies twixt cricks and hollers. It is four-ish when I come to Montgomery, when I cross the bridge into that once-pleasant city, to see if a particular pawn shop is open. I have looked inside so many times I can recall perfectly the wall of DVDs, the rows of guns and guitars whose imperfections I’ve never been able to assess. It is closed, as it always is, and I begin a dreary walk back to my exhausted car along Third Ave, past shut-down furniture stores and dilapidated mansions in the shadow of the abandoned WV Institute of Technology, which left Montgomery in 2017 and in its wake massive and stunning brick edifices, un-kept lawns which once held games of hacky-sack or discussions on developments in Engineering.
Between these homes, under the faded marquees of Pizza Shops advertising the best Pepperoni Rolls in West Virginia I find alley-ways strewn with fire escapes and clothes lines and can see the best of Italy, the most charming of Peru, in the gaps between this town’s once greatness and it’s current slump. In the aura of these brief divinities it is hard to imagine the flight from this place, it is hard to fathom that the last time I was here was for work, was to film a shooting which left two dead, left drugs and blood scattered across the main strip. That I stood there from three to eight a.m. as trains whizzed by, as thirty officers from six different departments took notes and questioned witnesses, as a neighbor told me that “things like this are five times as common as they are reported,” as a helicopter air-lifted a dying man to a hospital as if this were the wilderness, not his home.
Along these streets I walked, past my car, past the Amtrak station and further into the afternoon until the glorious rays of a sunset swiped my cheek and left me dead in my tracks. From the foot of a bodega advertising fifty-cent soda I watched as houses across the street were struck with an orange glow, were sanctified by this brief but magnificent event. And in the same moment I realized it was too early, was hours from Sunset; that while incredible the glow was somehow wrong. I searched the ground and found a lock-box with a hole carved out, and from that hole I found piercing orange rays projecting through the rain across the tracks and onto the buildings opposite. On that lock-box I met a man, a man called Jaja.
Interview #1
[The below is a re-creation of the first of two conversations I had with Jeremy Adkins Jr., one of the strangest men I’ve ever met and someone who seems to not only bleed creativity, but infect those around him with it. I didn’t feel comfortable recording this first chat as it was impromptu, but I did write as much as I could remember in my journal just minutes after speaking.]
Me: Is that a projector?
Jaja: Yup.
Me: That’s sick. How does that work?
Jaja: What?
Me: What’s causing that?
Jaja: Mirrors.
Me: Like, inside the box?
Jaja: [sigh] Yes.
Me: Oh, cool. How does that work?
Jaja (to a man leaving the bodega): You got an extra cig?
Me: Here.
Jaja: Thanks. Yeah it’s lenses. There’s a flame on the inside, and then a bunch of tiny pieces of glass refracting it or whatever, and then the light projects outwards through that hole. And I added flowers.
Me: Where?
Jaja: Right by the hole. Whenever I want to fire it up I find wildflowers and crush and press them onto a plate glass which slides into the hole. That’s why the light is orange.
Me: How often do you fire it up?
Jaja: Whenever I want to see a sunset and there isn’t one. Like today it’s raining, and I’m bored, so I set it up. It works best right here on those white buildings because I designed it in my shop right here, above the store.
Me: That’s sick.
Jaja: Thanks. One time Amtrak tried to fine me because the light blinded one of their drivers.
Me: Cool. I’m Ryan by the way.
Jaja: Jaja.
Me: Jaja?
Jaja: Where you from?
Me: I live in Charleston.
Jaja: I know, but where are you from?
Me: Connecticut originally, I moved here from California.
Jaja: There’s a guy in Danbury who used to come here to collect Trilobites.
Me: Oh cool.
Jaja: No he was insane.
Me: Are you a contractor?
Jaja: What’s that?
Me: I have no idea. Like someone who builds stuff?
Jaja: A builder?
Me: Yeah I guess.
Jaja: Then yeah.
Me: Sick. Do you get a lot of work with that?
Jaja: I do some furniture, and I repair instruments and amps or whatever. And some fashion, and I design covers for a few local musicians. Plus yeah, some ‘contracting.’
Me: Cool. I work at the radio station in Charleston, you should come on air and do an interview.
Jaja: Nah dude.
Me: Haha okay, can I get your number if you change your mind?
Jaja: No.
Me: Word.
Jaja: I’m on facebook. Just look up Jeremy Adkins Jr.
Me: Cool. Oh, I get it, Jaj-a.
Jaja: (turns away and stares at the houses across the tracks).
Me: Nice to meet you, man.
Jaja: So long.
March → June
The farewell stuck with me, kept Jaja prominent on my mind as if the ingenious contraption wasn’t enough. The phrase was rare to hear these days, but I was very familiar with it. It was a favorite of my grandfather’s, who’d yell it from his porch as our car drove away, his arm extended, hand cupping and splaying in a way I struggle to make look normal. The expression has mysterious origins, and one of its earliest uses came from a letter Walt Whitman wrote to a friend:
“So long” is a salutation of departure, greatly used among sailors, sports, and prostitutes— the sense of it is till we meet again— conveying an inference somewhere, somehow they will doubtless so meet— sooner or later.
I’m pretty sure my grandfather wouldn’t have heard much Whitman since his school days, if even then. As for Jaja, I couldn’t say.
I found him on facebook as promised, and what was there only deepened the mystery of the man. He had posted no photos, but there were sketches, ostensibly his, which served as self-portraits. A distinct style stood out: bulging eyes, cartoonishly large stenciled craniums and small, stifled mouths. His body was rarely human in these photos, and his favorite substitute was that of a bird. Others included lions, frogs, and a beloved West Virginia totem, the possum.
Luckily, others have posted for him. Flipping through his tagged photos I found grainy images dating back thirty years of him with musicians, photos where he’d be toying with strange instruments which looked like none I had seen before. Some seemed ancient, some like they haven’t been invented yet. I saw a Jaja who couldn’t be more than ten years old playing what looked like a Dulcimer, another which resembled a Ruan. He was shown with a theramin, a fiddle, and in one shot was seemingly making music from an old, boxy television. Whatever the setting of the photo, the room seemed to curve around Jaja, seemed to rotate around his focal point. All eyes would float towards him, as his were relentlessly piercing the ground1.
The next time I saw one of the other DJs at the station I asked her about Jaja. She had grown up in Charleston, and was my go-to resource for insider info on the artists who make up the Kanawha Valley scene. She knew who he was immediately, and seemed a little surprised that I had met the man. “He doesn’t do shows anymore, but yeah he’s a local legend. He used to headline shows around town with Tyler [Childers] and Sierra [Ferrell]. I haven’t seen him perform in years.”
I asked what type of music it was, and she shrugged. She tried explaining it briefly as experimental, industrial, but something stopped her and she insisted that it was actually kinda folky, sorta like John Prine meets Basquiat. When I asked another resource, I got a similar answer but with Nick Cave thrown into the mix. This second source mentioned a name which has become sacred in this state, adding to the lore that Jaja had worked closely with Daniel Johnston when he was twenty. He told me they had written an opera together, and that they developed an entire series of illustrations to accompany it. Copies of the designs were briefly handed around town, but he hadn’t seen one in years, and nothing came of the show as far as he had heard.
The more I learned about Jaja the more lucky I felt to have run into him, to have had the singular, precious conversation we had. When people spoke of his work, ending reliably with “he hasn’t performed in years,” I got to proudly add that he was working ‘in lenses,’ was firmly planted in Montgomery developing inventions and tools to weather the harshness of life just as he always had. This was a liberty I took with the truth, but being new here and having so little cultural caché I’m embarrassed to admit that I squeezed quite a bit out of my one-cigarette payment. Soon the conversations ended, I had talked him to death, had figured out all the strange and arcane sources for info on Jaja that I possibly could. My fandom lay dormant for a little while, especially after a message I sent online was never returned. For a while it seemed like the end of the story, until one day in Taylor Books I saw a poster which featured a simple drawing: cartoonishly head, tiny mouth, bulging eyes, on the body of a dragon. I leaned in and saw, in the smallest of fonts, a date and a location: July 11th at the Montgomery shop. It was all I needed.
Nobodies
On the afternoon of July 11th I drove solo out to Montgomery and parked in front of the same bodega where I had met Jaja three months earlier. A glass door broken and repaired several times over was propped open with a brick, and as I ascended the dark hallway staircase I could hear ambient music, ethereal drums patterns overlaid with a sporadic and disorienting piano tune, and at the top I opened a thick wooden door into a bare-boned studio full of people milling about. The sensation of moving from the ominous street under a setting sun and into the studio was much like the one I felt seeing that first faux-sunset, and in my head themes of Jaja’s work began to sprout and wind in and out of his mysterious character.
The flat was a massive warehouse layout, with walls reaching up about five feet short of the tall ceilings and on the bottom of them I could see wheels so that the lay-out might be changed based on Jaja’s needs. The floor was hardwood, with intermittent rugs placed about, occasionally overlapping, in a way so that they might serve as an ersatz tour guide through the strange exhibit. That’s what it was— an exhibit. People of a cacophony of ilks— wealthy-seeming locals with glasses of red wine next to haggard drifter’s laden with stained jackets. By the front door was a large placard mimicking the one you might see at MoMA which read Nobodies, and by the entrance sat a corny kiosk full of brochures. Inside were paintings and poetry which were indecipherable, but at the beginning of each section was a photo, and before me stood a replica of the first, a man in a rain jacket photographed under an awning, cigar in his mouth, eyes heavy with age and cast just below the camera’s lens as if he was studying the photographer’s necklace.
The portrait stood about six feet tall in front of me, and I entered the room it fronted and found a strange assortment of furniture. Lining the walls were glass cases filled with strange relics— a hat charred by fire, a wedding ring, a smoked and chewed cigar mirroring the one from the photo. Besides these objects were small inscriptions:
Robert’s favorite and longest lasting hat. He found it in his son’s bedroom after the kid left and it remained in a box for six years awaiting his return. One day Robert put it on and felt warmed by the fact that it fit perfectly, the first sign in years that somewhere out there was a remnant of his existence. He could be seen often at the Kanawha Lounge in Buckhannon wearing the hat, and in the rare occasion someone asked after it he noted that it was his son’s, as if he thoughtlessly borrowed it from a present and loving figure.
Robert’s wedding ring, removed three months before his divorce from Jolene and kept in a small chest in his bed-side lockbox. Notice a blood-stain on the left-edge, likely accrued from Robert’s work with toughened ropes on the barge-dock by the London Locks, three miles from Montgomery.
A smoked cigar collected after being tossed into the street by Robert. On the night of this cigar Robert announced his retirement to his closest friend, Samuel Hayes, who he then only spoke to three more times in the seven years before his death. Samuel was critical of the way Robert tossed his cigar into the street and commented quietly that “you never think of others, do you?”
Besides a damaged couch in the center of the room a placard read: the couch Robert sat on for thirteen years, which he threw out when Pitt upset WVU in the Backyard Brawl, 2007.
The room was filled with a poor recording of someone butchering Chopin, and a note beside the speaker read the second-to-last last time Robert played piano before his hands succumbed to arthritis and playing became impossible. On the Tuesday before his death Robert tried the keys from the out-of-tune piano which lay dormant for years in his living room. He was unable to make any pleasant noise, and through tears decided that if he could no longer make music, he’d rather not live.
I read the small plaques, suffered the same three-minute recording four or five times before moving on to the next room, finding another portrait. Beside it stood the DJ who had told me of Jaja’s work with Daniel Johnston, and I said hello quietly, as very few people present were speaking. She noted off-handedly how incredible the brush-work was, and I leaned in to see that it wasn’t a photograph but a painting. “That’s incredible,” I whispered, and realized the portrait of Robert in the rain was of the same style. I checked the brochure and commented that I thought they were all photographs. “They weren’t real,” she said, and I looked up into the second room, one filled with musty gray carpeting and reeking of perfume and years of indoor smoking and it dawned on me what the exhibit was. “Oh, these are all fake people?”
“If that’s how you want to see it.” She walked away and left me to roam the second gallery, titled Marsha Gorecki. There were objects and placards, details of Marsha’s childhood in Roanoke, the swing her sister fell off and died, the phonograph her grandmother used to wind for her, a paper airplane she made on the first date with a future husband, a brief marriage which ended when he died in Vietnam, the last human she would ever live with after a quiet life in Milton working at a grocery store and calling agencies requesting financial assistance for her utility bills. A small shriveled thing, purple and brown, identified as the liver removed in the failed attempt to cure her cancer. I felt deeply sad when I read about a trip Marsha tried to make to visit her husband’s grave in Norfolk, the way a torrential rain forced her to check into a motel in Charlottesville without a heater, the place where she would catch the pneumonia that eventually weakened and killed her. Jaja had nailed a note to the wall in Holiday Inn stationary which read “53 mi: Take exit 177 to merge onto I-295 S toward Norfolk, Washington 24 mi Take exit 28A to merge onto I-64 East toward Norfolk, VA Beach” in poor handwriting.
I moved through the other rooms, found bookmarks, lighters, mugs stained with lipstick and candles lit down to the nub. Each gallery included wallpaper and furniture designated to each subject of Jaja’s incredible work. Each room brought to life a life never lived, established from ashes the full and painful and beautiful remnants of nobodies who lived and died through the blurry and mad stuff of existence. I laughed at jokes never told, mused over pages from journals filled with the thoughts and grocery lists never fulfilled, never brought to reality except here, now, by Jaja. In the final room a solitary figure in a black hood sat motionless on a hand-crafted stool, a figure I identified by its bulk and workman’s hands as Jaja himself. The photo-realistic portrait at the front of the room read Jerome Adkins Jr. and showed Jaja in boxers dressing a horizontal wound on the inside of his thigh in front of a mirror. I leaned in and found in its reflection a bloody pocket-knife on the floor, discarded bandaging on the floor.
The room was sparsely decorated with far fewer objects than the previous ones. Included was a woodworking clamp which was listed as his father’s favorite tool for beating him, the same one he used to build the man’s coffin. There was a pink ribbon identified as Sara Harding’s, the first woman to show Jerome how a life lived in solitude would drain all the creative energies which Jerome felt were essential to live. It went on, “Jerome mistreated Sara, and when he left for three weeks to visit Seattle he returned to find her belongings gone and a note on the hobby-horse he built for their first daughter before Sara’s miscarriage.” Beside this, the note: “Jerome— in a way you and I never truly got to know each other. I’m sure we will painfully find in the years left to live, years which will be spent as strangers, the things we could have loved most about the other, even as memories of the pain inflicted fade. I will soon remember you fondly. Sara.”
Jaja: I won’t go to Charleston, but you can interview me here if you still want.
Interview #2
Jaja had not removed the hood over his head, but he now faced me. I took out my phone to find I was shaking, and began recording. I sat on a sofa a few feet to Jaja’s right, and he faced forward as I leaned the phone towards him. The transcript of our conversation has been reproduced below:
Me: This is an incredible show.
Jaja: [silence]
Me: How long did it take to work on?
Jaja: [silence]
Me: Is it only showing this once?
Jaja: Yes.
Me: Did any of these people exist?
Jaja: Every object in here is real. They have been the stuff of real lives, they have been manufactured for Purposes and have gone on to involve themselves in existence. The stories told are all real, about somebody, somewhere. We ought to be haunted by all of them.
Me: Am I wrong to think of the show as an ode to myth-building? As in, you have created a world inside here, and we are meant to imbue it with life, to “incarnate” it, and that these people become real as we carry them into the world?
Jaja: If that is what you’ll do with it, though I don’t recommend it. These people have weight to them, and if you choose to bear that weight outside of the studio it might bury you. Is that how you would act if you met them in the streets? Would you take the time to learn all these things, and if you did, would you be able to understand them on such an intimate level as you might’ve felt them tonight? Without feeling the roughness of their towels, without seeing their handwriting, their signature? Without flipping through their mail or hearing the sound of their doorbell? And if you could understand these things, how closely to your heart could you bear to keep them?
Me: It sounds to me like an experiment in empathy.
Jaja: Or maybe evidence of a lack thereof. Remember that each person in here tonight has the same burden of reality as the subject’s, and yet how many of us will take the time to learn it? How many of us would offer someone the chance to?
Me: I’m curious about the way you work. Was each object here curated for the exhibit, or is all this actually evidence of only one life, yours?
Jaja: There is no such thing as individuality, I think. Whether a piece you find tonight was inhabited by me or another, it is the residue of a community, and will disintegrate likewise, will revert to the same material with enough time. If each particle herein were traced to a specific path they would all, when viewed far enough away, resemble the same narrative. Creation, employment, destruction, and so on.I cannot claim any piece of matter from the earth, including the ones which make up myself right now.
Me: It seems like the show involved a massive amount of work for relatively little pay-off. Do you have a job?
Jaja: [silence]
Me: Do you consider promoting yourself more, or charging admission?
Jaja: To what end?
Me: Payment for your work. Fame, maybe.
Jaja: Fame is a flame which ignites and gives life to the voices in your head. I’ve spent long enough learning to work with them as they are, and wouldn’t want to give them any ideas.
Me: I noticed you don’t have much online presence.
Jaja: I flirted with that, but became terrified by the way digital technology might alter us. Think of the frequencies we used to live on. Wind, water, the murmuring of others. There is a new frequency to society, it churns at all times through the air, it is carried in waves through our walls and our minds and we have been forced to adjust our own frequency to its harsh amplitudes. We have tragically and totally re-wired the foundational resonance of our being, and I decided to be as little a part of that as possible.
I’m also weary of data, of the way they study our engagement, the way we move through the digital world. The way in which “they” actually are “we.” They aggregate us via every single byte that ever latched onto our presence and know exactly where to send us, what to put us through, better than we do, I suppose. And the worst part is that we, too, are aggregating machines. Quite good ones, relative to the food-chain, but against the clouds above and amongst us we stand no chance. I am bitter, I guess, to be out-done. I am fond of aggregating [he waved a hand around the gallery], and feel we’re being erased from an ancient duty that once constituted a life.
Me: Can you explain people as ‘aggregators’?
Jaja: The ability to acquire trillions of strings and weave them into something meaningful— a rope which might be pulled, identity— is the greatest thing which occurs in the cosmos. It is a timeless art, performed by all matter at all times. It occurs on a level far beneath and above us, and we are lucky to participate in that game.
Me: Myth-making.
Jaja: [silence]
This was the end of the conversation, and as I walked away I found the crowd dwindled to only a few stragglers, people looking like they’re out for a fix or a place to crash. I walked through the studio in reverse, lives blurring past me with dizzying meaning, and soon exited into the silent Montgomery night, away from the strange glow of the enigmatic man. I had a feeling that I’d never see him again. A feeling, I have no doubt, curated and disseminated in secret by Jaja himself like propaganda, or like words between elderly lovers.
It strikes me that men like this— mythmakers, mystics, frauds, perhaps— generally operate out of an exhaustion with the lay of the world as they’ve found it. Any youthful energy in Jaja is gone by this point, by the time he has learnt repeatedly the myriad methods of disappointment the flock of mankind will manifest to fuck you over, to spoil your dreams of saving the world.
They construct houses of mythos around themselves, out-chess anyone who enters in their search for an equal. They toss brilliant ideas, inspired inventions, purifying poetry and Oscar-worthy scripts into waste baskets because they don’t pass some ethical Strauss-test. They dream within those 5th through 12th dimensions, the ones curled up within our world so succinctly we pass through them without realizing we left our plane and returned countless times over. They are alternately good or bad, having moved so far beyond these concepts that trying to employ them is like applying sunscreen to a worm.
They are desperate, heroic figures. And they’d like to be left alone.
I wrote a version of this essay months ago, and when returning to the facebook page to fact-check these photos I found it was removed.