Word reached me today that Lewis Green -- one of the scariest, most fascinating people I ever met -- kicked the bucket last Friday.
Lewis was a Smoky Mountain newspaper guy who was too wild and woolly for newspapers... and that was back in the days when newspaper work was wild and woolly by definition. He was a combat Marine from the Korean War -- one of the Chosin Few -- and a mountain-mean, ass-kicking hell-raiser. He was a libertarian / Republican who was connected to white supremacists and knew all the guys who were training right-wing militias in the camps around Western North Carolina in the early 1990s, but he was also an FBI informant (or so he told me), and a poet, and I've got a signed copy of his sensitive Korean War novel Spirit Bells on a shelf upstairs.
Lewis was a gratuitously ornery, rude motherfucker, and as a rookie reporter I liked the man as much out of self-preservation as sincere admiration. He ran his own little newspaper, The Independent Torch, and if the man set his sights on you, he'd gleefully set your ass on fire in its pages. The Torch wasn't fair or balanced (it was, in fact, often demonstrably deranged), but the flip side to that was that once Lewis put his mind to something he'd root out every secret, expose every flaw, damn every hint of hypocrisy. The Reporter From Hell. Few of us can stand up to that kind of treatment.
Here's my favorite Lewis Green story: When he was a reporter for the Asheville Citizen-Times (which in later years he took to calling "The Gray Whore" or, sometimes, just "The Whore"), Lewis got so mad at his editor that he punched the man in the nose. The editor foolishly filed an assault charge, and the case went to court. Apparently the judge didn't like the editor much either and let Lewis off with a $100 fine. Green's famous response: "Your honor, if I give you another hundred dollars, can I punch the sunuvabitch again?"
Lewis was born in Haywood County and had plenty of stories to tell about the place, most of them tawdry, scandalous and sensational. He once said of Waynesville that "it was the only town in America that has raised adultery to the level of civic virtue." He was an encyclopedia of unprintable hometown slanders, and wasn't afraid to share the address of the chalet on Black Camp Gap Road where local lawyers held wife-swapping parties.
He once told me this hilarious (though absolutely horrific) story about a prominent local figure who'd made the mistake of pursuing an affair with the wife of a not-so-prominent local figure. When the husband caught the pair together, Lewis said, he led the man down into the basement, made him lay his cock on a wooden table, and gave him a choice between death and dismemberment. The man chose dismemberment, but gathered up his severed organ and rushed to the hospital, where it was sewn back on, more or less intact.
There's an awful lot more, much more than I can tell here. Suffice it to say that much of what Lewis said and did was indefensible, and there was no doubt that he bullied people who didn't deserve it. That said, Lewis represented a spirit -- flawed and excessive though it may have been -- that was original and wild and independent and fierce. I liked him despite my better judgment, and a world without him is a little more bland than it used to be.
I don't know why he tolerated me, but I'm awfully glad he did.
Comments