The Hiccup №2

The spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald returns to haunt a writer at a brewery in this comic series set in Asheville, North Carolina.

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I was somewhere in between being hungover and being in between, when the spirit of Fitzgerald and I were at the brewery by the river again and, alongside some hair of the dog, were making our way back from being hungover and toward being hungover sometime in the future.

The pair of IPAs I’d ordered us, which appeared to be even hazier than we looked, though they had lost their heads by the time I walked the beers back to our picnic table by the river, seemed to have Fitzgerald measuring his words more carefully than he’d ever had with me, so I figured I’d go back for pilsners for the next round, once I was finished telling him about another brewery I was at the other day, the third oldest in Asheville but the first with Asheville in its name, down on Merrimon Avenue, only half a mile east of the apartment I was renting for the summer.

At the next table over from me, at the third oldest brew­ery in Asheville, there was a pair of want-to-be musicians — which, between you and me on this side of the fourth wall, I’ll admit I never understood what was so bad about a want to be, though in the case of these two it sounded like the first thing they did as want-to-be musicians was sign with a want-to-be agent — and while they were meeting with their agent, for over an hour and a total of only two beers for the three of them, the agent was telling them, for some reason unknown to me, about the duration of copyrights.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three genera­tions. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day.

I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him — with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe — so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, “Why — ye-es,” with very grave hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

Here, where the spirit of Fitzgerald and I were at the brewery by the river, couldn’t have been any more than a ten minute walk north from Highland Hospital — which if you don’t mind me break­ing the fourth wall once again, we’ll have to get to Highland Hospital a little later in The Hiccup. Of course we’ll also get to the Grove Park Inn and to the first time I met Fitzgerald, but for the time being, just so you know, if you didn’t know, there is a historical sign I pass by every other day on my morning run, just down the road from the brewery, off of Riverside Drive, that reads:

ZELDA FITZGERALD

Writer, artist, Jazz Age
icon; wife of F. Scott
Fitzgerald. In 1948,
she and 8 other patients
died in fire at Highland
Hospital, ¼ Mile S.

North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 2017

There might be something to the fact that the sign wasn’t put up until 2017, but then there might be something to the fact that the sign was put up in 2017, that it would have said something very different about Zelda Fitzgerald, not to mention the order of occupations, if it were put up before 2017. We’ll have to get back to the sign and the significance of time later — but I figured the spirit of Fitzgerald might want to head over to where Highland Hospital once was if I ordered us some­thing to-go for the walk down from the brewery, to the historic district off of Riverside Drive.

I didn’t bother asking if he wanted a pilsner as I got up to get us another round, seeing the way he was treating the IPAs and how they were treating him, but back at the counter I saw the brew­ery had some North German Pilsner I hadn’t seen before. North German Pilsner. North Germany wasn’t where my father lived when he was in Germany but somewhere in the southwest corner of the country. North German Pilsner. At least it was just a north-south distinction and nothing else, so I ordered us a round of North German.

Kellerpils were what I usually got the spirit of Fitzgerald and myself here, and while I wasn’t too familiar with what a Kellerpils was, it being German, I figured it had to translate in one way or another to cellar beer, which must have been why I liked them so much, cellar beer being the most beautiful sounding phrase in English, or at least the German side of English, but I thanked the bartender and paid for the North German Pilsners and brought them back to our picnic table by the river.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog — at least I had him for a few days until he ran away — and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

Britt McDermott is an artist from Atlanta, Georgia.

Sam Farahmand is a writer from Los Angeles.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is a writer from St. Paul, Minnesota.

The Hiccup is a comic series set in Asheville, North Carolina: №1, №2.