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Credit Liam Niemeyer / Ohio Valley Resource
As Barkley Hughes and I rumbled around in his red utility vehicle last month, memories slowly unwound about his western Kentucky hometown.
Tolu, a historic Ohio River-bound community of less than a hundred, only makes up a few blocks before opening up into rolling farmland. Hughes openly admits it’s not near anywhere, but that’s part of the reason he came back.
He points to the Methodist church across the street he attended growing up. There’s the community center that would put together a “haunted house” around Halloween. There’s what used to be the general store in town, which he figures closed more than a decade ago because it’s hard to get deliveries out in a place so remote.
4
Two of the very first CDs I owned, unless my increasingly moth-ridden memory is betraying me, were Erasure’s greatest hits album
Pop! and the Pet Shop Boys’
Very, whose bright orange, Lego-like case I can still recall to this day. I ordered them in secret from a Columbia House catalog; their offer of what essentially amounted to free CDs before they made you pay up the nose for shit you didn’t want got me good. Remember that scam, where you started off by buying a handful of CDs for a penny?
For a middle schooler, their promise of shackling you to a lifetime of harassment from debt collection agencies felt like an answered prayer. I probably stole my dad’s credit card to pay for my habit after the initial outlay of a single cent, thus confining him and not me to that lifetime of harassment from debt collection agencies. (He never mentioned anything though, so I got away with it, and at any rate, it’s fine now because he’s dead!)