part one : "the drive up the mountain"
as per her handwritten letter - because she is rarely available by phone or email; a neverending PR nightmare for booking - which also has instructions to be burned upon reading, i arrived on a desolate gravel road, beside a ramshackle saloon, alone, in back country monticello. there were no further instructions as what to expect next.
always a child of the eleventh hour, almost a half an hour late meeting my arrival, a beaten red pickup truck arrives to my location from a side road, barreling down the road with purpose, creating a giant, roaring dust cloud behind her. it's the doll : the 'it' girl of the century, who has been on hiatus for over a year. the tabloid favorite, kathleen grace, disappeared from the public eye in the spring of 2017 - until now - she has finally agreed to come out from her self-imposed hibernation, freeing the masses from chasing her shadow.
she pulls up with a skid, windows down and music blaring. there is a gun rack hanging from her back window, rifle in place. a half-smoked doobie rests in the ashtray, a bottle of beer between her legs. buck owens' "made in japan" plays on the radio. i toss my bag in the back, alongside some campfire wood.
she drives wildly, taking sharp corners with speed, causing the doobie in the ashtray to slide from left to right with each turn, yet never enough momentum to fall. she makes several seemingly arbitrary turns onto roads, each road worse than the one before, with steeper and steeper inclines, narrower passes, laden with washboard gravel - "from the logging trucks," she comments - making a hairpin turn onto a rocky, winding path that one might have once called a street. if it didn't have the welcome sign precariously placed, reading : nightingale drive, you'd drive right past it. to the left of the road is a dropoff and at the bottom, the raging river. to the right, steep hills carve the canyon that her humble locale rests in. she eyeballs up, remarking that whitetail deer have oft been seen not more than 100 yards away and just recently had babies.
we pull up and the scene is breathtaking. river in the background, a proud farmhouse in the foreground, tall pine and fir trees encompass the property, making it feel private and far-away. a sheep pen can be seen off by the barn, cows chewing their cud in the pasture behind them. chickens roam freely around the grounds, "'cept for the victory garden," kathleen says quickly, pointing to an area overgrown with luscious greens, sunflowers, fruits and vegetables, "the chickens would be the death of my crops. jimmy has been trying to teach them to herd, but so far, no dice."
the fruits of the farm's labors could not be made possible without, of course, the local "freaks". many years ago, after the dissolution of the freak festival, the encampment of doll followers moved to monticello, to the piece of undeveloped farmland kathleen had acquired. the family of misfits, hippies, outcasts, little rich kids, artists and weirdoes alike call "the freak farm" - as it's known in the tabloids - home since.
yet, not only a few klicks down the road, sits a cold, empty and loveless cabin, purchased by none other than jimmy kiss' younger brother, joey kiss. supposedly a "gift" for kathleen around the time of the couple's engagement - the engagement would be called off before the paint could dry.
the move to the freak farm became an obvious choice and a necessary one. the environment is perfect for quetzalith "baby q" lux, her daughter; the farm is also several hours outside of arcadia's distracting entanglements that have gotten kathleen in trouble before. monticello has a lot of history for her and is almost an uncanny place - a town seemingly out of the 1960s : american flags outside each cookie-cutter home, coca cola ads out front of the local grocery shop; neighbors on the lawn waving as you drive by as innocent neighborhood kids jump through sprinklers to the tune of "my country 'tis of thee".
to wit, the farmhouse was built in 1962 and was originally owned by kathleen's second aunt, who initially rented-to-own for "a measly 50 bucks a month!" it came with two chickens and a collection of encyclopedias. she mentions the property dearly throughout my time with her and with nostalgia - her family must have made the property their point rendezvous for holidays and family vacations - perhaps for locale, for scenery or as force of habit. you can feel the memories created in the creaks of the floor and the groans of the radiator kicking on. the vibrations of kinetic happiness echoing throughout for the rest of time. several vintage photographs - appearing to be mostly from the 70s - have some of the same pieces of furniture and art that are in the house to this day, portentous that this house isn't a getaway, it is the getaway for the doll.
you walk in the front door and into the kitchen, with tall, boastful ceilings that lead into a sitting room, complete with full stone fireplace, with a greenhouse attached on the side. several overgrown jade plants spill onto the floor and out of their pots, spider plants hang luxuriously next a glittering chandelier. behind them, a bay window; behind that, the farm life rages on, the river raging beside it. an irrepressible sense of life is felt, creating a glow from the overwhelming spirit of nature.
past the kitchen are several hallways - the left leading to an office and sewing room; the right leading to a pantry and proper laundry room, which also serves as a pepper and herb drying room, with strings of chilies and herbs from the garden hanging off of a clothesline next to a piece of cheeky red lingerie. past these hallways leads into a living room, complete with large color television, pool table, darts board; a wood room, with stove fireplace to warm this section of the house in the corner. adjacent from this room is a bathroom and sauna and spare bedroom. a spiral staircase, however, is the focal point of this part of the home, leading to the lofty upstairs. her bedroom has a full garden tub, with lush selections of plants and flowers strewn around; french doors open to a large balcony wrapping around the room, overlooking the property. three bedrooms are also on this floor, one being quetzy's, one being headlock's and one being ludo's. sodapop has taken full reign of the downstairs bedroom when he's visiting once a month to hand off a bag of fanmail, according to kathleen.
not much has changed in that sense with her, or her camp - she still piles her ratty blonde curls on top of her head, dresses in a mixture of phases from fashion's archive, the outfits still draping off her svelte frame; her blue eyes still beam out from behind her mess of bangs, her mischievous smile still hides behind a corner of her cherubic lips. and, of course, she still dons the pink ballet slippers - dirty from the overuse, with a reputation that precedes them.
the same can be said for her counterpart, jimmy kiss. he scampers into the kitchen from the upstairs, with long, languid steps. he lopes into the room, dopey smile plastered on his face. he, like the doll, seems to be a person borne of another time. perhaps it is his happy-go-lucky disposition - he never flounders to be a "glass half full" type of person and is, in a way, the physical embodiment of shaggy from scooby doo, with the personality of thurston moore.
jimmy kiss is very tan, having either been out in the fields working, in the river fishing or both; he is dressed in army fatigues, faded from the sun and soft from being worn often. he pushes his messy sunbleached hair out of his eyes and says warmly, "i'm jimmy, jimmy kiss - jimmy, not joey, ok? i want to make sure we're clear on that..." he begins, nodding to past interviews where his words, let alone his character alone, have been taken out of context. "how do you like the farm?" he says happily, switching gears, "quite a port in the storm we've got here, huh?"
as for their world, similarly, nothing much has changed - the two still have the wolfman jack show drifting in and out; kathleen is still partial to her doobies and cuppa tea, with jimmy still partial to her. quetzy, the token child in the mix and now nearing her fourth birthday, is away for the weekend, leaving kathleen and jimmy up to their own devices. however, if she were at the property, she would most likely "be running around in circles, babbling; talking about stuff and not really doing much," kathleen notes, dashing the presses hopes of a child prodigy.
"i know what you're thinking," she says, lighting a cigarette, "what is this girl doing in the middle of nowhere? i'll tell you - i just needed to be around real people, you know? real monticello people. farm folk. old timers. townies. nice people. people who don't carry around phones in their pocket and get word alerts all day. people who haven't been desensitized by the big, bad city."
"tell me about it, babe, it's been a real fresh breath of air to be up in these them thar mountains," jimmy says in agreeance.
"i mean, they still show hogan's heroes on TV here, you understand? and we only have 5 stations to pick from - one of them is PBS. this little homestead is like the still point of the turning world for me, right now. it's like i pressed pause on the real world to come here and let my hair down."
she continues, "i've been writing loads, too. i wake up and play with quetzy; i feed the animals and water the garden and i write from noon until dusk. the boys make dinner and i write in my journal, or answer my fanmail...write notes for future pieces." she divulges later that her next, and possibly last, book is to be titled the last of the arcady roses or 🥀. as far as has been understood, it will be her final piece and a sendoff to arcadia, her home.
she emphasizes this again later by pointing out her typewriter and a stack of notes she's been compiling. "i've been writing essays too," she says proudly, "i'm getting back to my roots. real raw, powerful stuff. kind of bleeding onto the page, if you will." she makes no mention as to what topic she's been writing on; nor does she mention if this turn of a new leaf will mean the end of the doll. seemingly, it is a hint that her artistic wind will soon be blowing her sails in a new direction. she does assert, though, cryptically, that, "i will never escape the doll. she is my archetype and i am now hers. but i am no god - i am me."
her representation of herself couldn't be more spot on. she has been called many things, been painted with many different brushes and still, she remains. she's been a junkie, a martyr, a muse, a mess, a songstress, a nomad, a heartbreaker, a pain in the ass, a front page regular, a brat, a household name, a bitch, a force to be reckoned with, et. al.
and survey says she isn't done yet.
