Hunter never lets go until he's told you a story (Page 1 of 2)

I had the privilege of handing my friend David Hunter the 2008 Career Achievement Award from the Knoxville Writers Guild on April 26 in a gala at St. James Episcopal Church. In case you missed it, I mentioned a call I received from David the other day and — about halfway through it — he said, “Well, Don, I’ll let you go now.”

I knew he was lying though. David never lets you go before telling at least one good story. Or three. Or 14. They’re always entertaining. They start out something like:

“Did I ever tell you about my Great Uncle Nate who fell off the roof and landed on his head? He used to preach in his sleep. Only in his sleep. I heard him once. This strange old man came wandering into the yard, he was in his 80s then. Mama ran out and asked him how he got there all the way from Middlesboro, Ky., and he said, ‘I took a bus.’ When she asked him how he found the house, he said, ‘I got off on Main Street in Knoxville and asked the first man I saw if he knew Bill Hunter, and the man said, ‘Is he an ironworker?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know, but he was in the Marine Corpse.’” He emphasized corpse.

Anyhow, while David’s mom phoned to let his dad know his crazy Uncle Nate was at the house, and while she talked, Great Uncle Nate proved just how crazy he was by bringing out two razor sharp knives and blocks of wood to teach David how to carve.

“After I nearly sliced a finger off,” says David, “Mama ran back inside to stop the bleeding. Later, I heard him preaching in the middle of the night, punctuating each line with a shouted ‘Ha!’ The next day, they put him on a bus. Shortly after that, we moved… ”

I once wrote that interviewing David was like reaching a paper cup into a waterfall. Stories pour out faster than you can catch them. He’s like our late lamented friend, Leslie Garrett, author of The Beasts and In the Country of Desire and a dozen bizarre short stories published here and there. Leslie liked telling all kinds of stories — about traveling around Europe with Cormac McCarthy and Annie DeLisle, and the parties he went to where Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs and Lawrence Ferlenghetti showed up, and about his own crazy relatives growing up.

It’s no wonder David hit it off with Les. When I’d knock on Leslie’s Fort Sanders apartment door, sometimes Les and David would be there brewing a perfect storm of one-part humor, two-parts profundity and three-parts bullshit, and I’d feel like Jon Stewart trying to come up with a quip only to conclude, “I — I got nothin’.”

Sometimes essayist Michael Gillespie, writer Jeanne McDonald or others would visit, and it was at such meetings the idea of the Knoxville Writers Guild was conceived. Anyway, it was during such story-swapping sessions I first came to know David. I’d met him a time or two previously, but mostly I knew him through his columns and books.

Surely more than 1,000 of his columns have run so far in two Knoxville papers, where he’s championed unions, literacy, abused women, racial harmony, animal rights, higher wages, benefits for public servants and opposed needless wars, high crimes and misdemeanors, and where he became a feuder and friend of legendary columnist Jim Dykes, which is a story for another day.

The books were something else altogether, and the early ones had great titles. The Moon is Always Full, Black Friday Coming Down, There Was Blood on the Snow, The Night is Mine. Later he wrote another in that line, The Archangel Caper, which I had the pleasure of publishing.

Up until then, not many frontline cops wrote books, Joseph Wambaugh being a notable exception. But David practically invented the short, creative nonfiction cop testimonial, and in doing so, he influenced writers from Larry Brown — a Mississippi fireman — to Sharyn McCrumb.

I remember a phone call I got from David, regarding her, when he said, “Don, I need help.” That was a rare thing to hear David admit. He said, “Sharyn McCrumb autographed her book for me, and she wrote, ‘From the Honky-tonk Angel to the Great Speckled Bird.’ Don, I can’t sleep. Do you have any idea what that means?” Then he told me seven more stories. Later that evening, I was out running, and those songs, which are two of my favorite old-time numbers — some of you might remember my Daddy used to whistle ‘The Great Speckled Bird’ — were running through my head and the answer came to me. They both have the same tune. Hum the opening bars if you don’t believe me. “It wasn’t God who made honky-tonk angels…” and “What a beautiful thought I’ve been thinkin’… ”