“I’ve called this meeting to discuss a matter that disturbs me, and I feel certain must also disturb you,” Mary said. “I’m speaking of the mess that Woodrow Bunce has created on his front lawn.

... “Now, I don’t claim to be an expert, but I do know people have rights concerning what a neighbor can do with his or her property. What Mr. Bunce has done is not only an eyesore, but is a danger to young children. It could also possibly devalue surrounding property.”

What? Devalue property, hurt the children? Familiar themes still today, but this was 1989 and I was living in the Triangle and was always, it seemed, sitting in my old Mazda truck at stoplights beside those same yuppies in their BMWs. I connected with his writing immediately. McLaurin wasn’t the first to chronicle the chasm between the old South and those who came later amid the prosperous ‘80s and ‘90s. He did it, though, with the voice of a native who was among perhaps the first generation in the South to grow up with one foot firmly entrenched in the old ways and yet completely a part of the new, himself educated at Carolina and doing a stint in the Peace Corps.

McLaurin appealed to me also because of where he was from — Fayetteville and the Cape Fear area just east of the city. That’s the town I call home, and though he is six years older than me, we shared some of the same experiences growing up in a town shaped by its Southerness and its links to the huge military base at Ft. Bragg. Perhaps the book that I liked the best by McLaurin was Keeper of the Moon: A Southern Boyhood, a memoir that he put together after he successfully fought off leukemia with a bone marrow transplant. Feeling his mortality, McLaurin undoubtedly had a longing to record his own past and how it shaped him.

Fayetteville is a sprawling, blue-collar town and contrasts strangely with adjacent Fort Bragg Army Base, where the 82nd Airborne Division and the Green Berets train. Over four wars, natives and soldiers have bought and sold from each other, flirted with each other’s wives and daughters, and fist-fought in bars whenever two or more fellows needed to prove that the uneasy truce between town and base was kept up out of strength rather than weakness.

McLaurin captured the rough-and-tumble, scrappy, edgy side of Fayetteville in his memoir. In a town where terrible violence seems all too common and almost expected, McLaurin also saw through some of the bravado and found the humor that those same circumstances evoke in men and boys. Anyone who knew “Fayetnam” in the 70s and 80s remembers Hay Street and its wild west atmosphere.

It’s gone now, but there was once a carnival atmosphere that was non-stop. Home from college one time and in my father’s truck, I went to a dive on the strip for a beer with a high school friend. When we left, we found the camper top window broken and my dad’s prized golf clubs gone.

We immediately began canvassing the pawn shops within about a four-square block area, and sure enough there were dad’s clubs. The owners said a 10-year-old street punk had brought them in. We laughed as we left, imagining that kid who probably had never been within 10 miles of a golf course toting that big set of clubs past strip clubs and tattoo parlors, and how the pawn shop owner must have known they were hot property but also knew he had a pretty good deal.

That’s one of my Hay Street stories, but among McLaurin’s funniest came when he lost his virginity to one of the flamboyant prostitutes that used to frequent the strip. Boys growing up in Fayetteville loved to ride down there and hear the propositions, but most never had the courage or money to take the ladies up on their offers. McLaurin did one night after a high school basketball game:

The stairway opened into a musty-smelling room where a couple of large black men stared up at us from chairs. One peered over his shades at me, then took my money and handed the woman a key. We went down a hallway to a room I knew I would never leave alive. Inside, there were only a bed with a white sheet and a scarred table.

... I stared at the wavy surface of the bed. The mattress was sunk in the middle. I got my jersey off and laid it on the table, but balked at removing my trunks. I wished I had taken a shower. If I was fixing to be murdered, I wanted to be found clean.

McLaurin wasn’t murdered that night, but his life since the success of Woodrow’s Trumpet and Keeper of the Moon remained a turbulent mix of alcohol, disease, personal woes and triumphs, and writing. He ended up producing seven books, and I can’t wait to read the rest of them.

What kept me fascinated by McLaurin’s life and his books was his duality, his ability to write a kind of biting social satire like Harry Crews that revealed the author to be more at home in the underbelly of society than up in its ranks. He would then sprinkle that writing with the beautiful prose of someone like Charles Frazier. He wrote about the low-class, working South, and in many of those men and women he found a dignity that most either can’t see or don’t want to. And his writing could indeed sparkle. Here’s his description of a morning in the Piedmont:

“I am still joined by something sacred to Southern country mornings. If indeed there exists a physical heaven, I hope it is patterned after North Carolina between the summer hours of six and eight a.m. The haunting call of doves, leaves jeweled with dew, the glint of the sun in oak branches, robins and roosters in duet, fog — something eternal exists in those minutes that a person carries in memory for life.”

(Scott McLeod can be reached at info@smokymountainnews.com)