Asheville Stories - Quill and the Pissfire

Quill was a tall, skinny kid who used to always wear a green military flight suit. He was just 19; I must’ve been 21 or 22. Quill said he never drank because of the damage he’d done to his liver by mixing cocaine and alcohol. I knew that when you do this a chemical called cocaldehyde is formed in your body. Aldehydes are sort of bad for your liver. But Quill told a lot of tall tales - lies, really. They were mostly about himself, so it didn’t bother me, and I pretended to be gullible, so we were friends. He was also autistic, which meant we got along easy. Quill used to always play his favorite song by Blackbird Raum (?) on his guitar, “Cities”. I told him about how 5 or 6 years ago I saw Blackbird Raum at Folklife in Seattle, busking on the street like he did. He was jealous.

Quill didn’t have food stamps because he said that Cartel would trace his ID and hunt him down. According to him, this was because his dad was wanted by the Cartel and was in hiding. I thought this was probably his way of coping with his absent father.

Quill set up his hammock at Lost Boys Camp, the place across from the Ingles and the Taco Bell that Lucas worked at. Lots of kids camped here. First it was just ,e and Shabazz, but then Kiev and Lucas moved in down the hill. Pretty soon we had other kids coming and going, Bill and Microsoft Jacob, anybody who ended up getting wasted with us. Austin came later.

Quill liked to call this spot Hippie Valley. In the morning he’d refuse to get out of his hammock until I brought him a cigarette. I can still remember his mischievous little eyes, poking out over the rim of his hammock, acidified. A very charismatic individual.

It wasn’t easy spanging downtown Asheville for multiple reasons. First, panhandling, as in directly asking for money, was a ticket. You could get away with holding a sign that didn’t solicit money - like “Smile”.

Second, Asheville was a competitive busking scene. To make money busking there you had to be pretty good. The only instrument I played was a penny whistle, and I couldn’t play with other people - couldn’t harmonize. And there were a lot of bums, so there were smaller portions of charity for us each.