Growing up poor in a moral and cultural cesspool has its perks. Did I just use the plural? I meant to use the singular. The perk is, if you survive such an upbringing, you come out at the other end with stories. Yes, “stories.” That time, I meant to use the plural.

Remember how Mr. Rogers used to take you to Make-Believe Land? I’m escorting you to Make-It-Go-Away Land. There are no puppets where we’re going. If there were puppets, they’d all be carrying tiny foil spoons—for freebasing.

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

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The world’s dankest alleys are teeming with drug addicts, mad derelicts, and morally deficient perverts. Desolate places attract desolate company. The Southwest Virginian oubliette we call Martinsville is no exception.

An oubliette is a prison with its only entrance, and thus its only exit, its ceiling. In other words, once you’ve been dropped in, you’re not getting out without a rope or a ladder. There’s no better metaphor for life in Martinsville than the oubliette. The only possible contender would be a word signifying an oubliette full of snakes. I don’t think that word exists. If it does, send it my way. I’ll chain it to the wall and put it to steady use.

Martinsville’s renowned collection of maniacal derelicts proves the appropriateness of my analogy. With its once booming textile industry dead and rotting, Martinsville’s primary export is crazyfolk. They’re exported, but they don’t leave. They flock to the streets, where they can frighten children and use public buildings as urinals. Martinsville houses a caliber of derelict more common to major cities. Martinsville’s languid economy and its aversion to progressive ideas make it a hotspot for the hopeless.

Well, I should be honest. I can’t speak for the present, being that I’m an expatriate, but I can attest to the lay of the land prior to my escape. The prime area for traumatic encounters with crazyfolk was the area surrounding the police station, spanning from Moss Street to Commonwealth Boulevard. One could spot shambling figures around the clock on College Street. Continuing down College led to the Railroad Street tunnel, where yours truly has on a number of occasions feared for his life. Is that the silhouette of a machete on that tunnel wall? Oh, my!

My favorite of Martinsville’s rogue gallery was a crooked old man in a blue hoodie, a gent my peeps and I dubbed the Quarter Man. The last time I saw Quarter Man, he told me his name was “Maddog,” but I suspect he was confusing his name with that of the less-than-savory alcoholic beverage. It’s a common enough mistake. Who hasn’t at some time or another accidentally written their name out as “Wild Irish Rose” on a job application?

The Quarter Man wandered the mean streets of Martinsville even more than I did. He earned his moniker by asking my friend for a quarter. He said he wanted to buy a soda from a Sam’s Choice machine to wash down his medicine. He frequented Uptown Martinsville, near the Post Office, but I saw him as far as Liberty Fair Mall and Wal-Mart. He got around. I never once saw him without that blue hoodie.

It still irks the comic book geek in me that I never learned Quarter Man’s secret origin. For all I knew, he was a genius—a lone wanderer who had been mind-wiped by the Canadian government after discovering the secret formula for a successful public health-care system. Or, he was among the few survivors of the endangered hobo class, those modern day Buddhas who favor independence over material enslavement.

If all of Martinsville’s derelicts were as harmless as Quarter Man, then this would be our concluding paragraph. See all those paragraphs under this one? That’s where we’re headed next. I’m not ready to toss the rope down yet. Welcome to the oubliette.

One summer Saturday afternoon, as I walked back from the mall with the then-latest issue of Ultimate Spiderman, I was intercepted by a gentleman I’ve since come to regard as Crack Pirate. Crack Pirate was accompanied by a prepubescent entourage—one a boy, one a girl, neither older than 11. Seeing them together like that, I questioned Batman’s troubling penchant for taking on children as sidekicks. The Joker never said, “Oh, no! It’s the Caped Crusader and his prepubescent cohorts! I’d best put down this fiery chainsaw and surrender, before that child disarms me with his youthful naiveté!”

Crack Pirate was a scrawny man in his 30s. He had rotting teeth and an open white shirt, the kind of shirt you’d expect to see Johnny Depp wear in a certain series of popular fantasy films. It was summer, but this was no high-grossing summer blockbuster, and Crack Pirate was no Jack Sparrow. Ironically though, given the historical reality of pirates, a meandering crack addict is arguably more akin to a bona fide pirate than Johnny Depp in eyeliner. Go figure.

Through this decadent open shirt, Crack Pirate persistently scratched his chest, either unaware or indifferent to his adherence to addict stereotypes. When he and his motley crew spotted me, Crack Pirate told his cronies to stand back and wait. It was too late for me to change trajectory. I was about to be hijacked.

Crack Pirate stopped in front of me and asked me if I was hot. When I replied that I did feel a bit peaked under the mid-summer sun, he suggested that I put down my comic book and rest for a while. Ever protective of my geek-gains, I told Crack Pirate that I was fine, and that I’d be home soon enough. Crack Pirate then referred to me by a racial epithet and asked if I had any money.

When I gave him 35 cents, Crack Pirate looked at the change, emitted what can best be described as the sound of an asthmatic chicken, and said, “That’s it?” I took that opportunity to resume walking. I heard Crack Pirate and his entourage slurring me as I sped away. I had escaped, and I’d managed to do so without fight or fondle. In Henry County, that’s cause for celebration.

Today, I consider Crack Pirate the most bizarre of the loonies I encountered in Martinsville. That’s not to suggest that it was an easy call, because it wasn’t. Crack Pirate had some stiff competition. On a walk to Rives Theater one Friday night, for example, there was a man who, coming from Clay Street, stoically asked where Clay Street was—with tears of blood streaming from his unblinking eyes. Another contender, met on a routine walk with friends to Dollar General, followed us and aggressively requested that we donate change toward his purchase of a hotdog. He called us “Youngblood” and wore headphones with no playback device attached.

Considering I was never stabbed, raped, or stabraped, I count myself lucky. I’ve opted to interpret these experiences with a (wary) smile. It’s all in good fun. Kids will be kids, and unhinged derelicts will be unhinged derelicts. They’re not so bad, so long as they’re not trying to get into bed with you. Most aren’t even dangerous, body odor notwithstanding.

What’s more dangerous than an unhinged derelict? Try an unhinged derelict with religious convictions. Or, on second thought, don’t. I’ve encountered enough in my time for the lot of us. Grinning in the wake of these crazies isn’t so easy. I can’t count how many times I was accosted as a child and made subject to tales of damnation and divine wrath.

No, that’s a fib, because I can count: It’s happened four times, or more if we count all the episodes I’ve repressed. A child doesn’t consciously forget promises of hellfire by strange men who reek of old popcorn and fried bologna.

The most intense of these sermons occurred as I played an arcade game in the lobby of Martinsville’s illustrious cultural hub, the Wal-Mart Supercenter. Because I was playing an arcade game, God apparently sent one of his chosen to inform me of my pending damnation. It’s OK to harass children, but not to play Rampage: World Tour at a department store. I’ll remember that if I ever suffer enough brain damage to travel the pious route.

A toothless skeleton at Price’s “Minute Market” also informed me that all young people are doomed to burn. A joyous vagrant encountered in a Food Lion checkout line claimed that the end of the world was going down in less than a month, and that he was traveling by foot to meet it halfway. He was sane enough to realize he needed to skip town, at least. (That last encounter remains my only sighting to date of a real-life hobo suitcase, the stick-and-bag tote you see on old Looney Tunes cartoons.)

Religious derelicts are more menacing than knife-wielding derelicts. A rusty blade is a bubble-bath compared to mean-street fanaticism. Religi-bums bill themselves champions of the divine will; they’re the would-be eggs to Jesus’ crazy cake mix. Nothing would please these bad eggs more than to smear their feces full across the face of the society that has failed them.

Oh, and we’ve all failed them. Personal responsibility isn’t part of their cake batter. They substitute responsibility with persecution complex, and the cake suffers. Everyone’s cake suffers. Those needles dangling out of their arms? Stuck there by the government. Their lack of success? A world saturated in sin that aims to punish the righteous. Scum-zealots believe their discontentment to be the direct result of the Illuminati, Satan, and the unconventional hairstyles worn by young people.

In my early 20s, I spent a year in Richmond. That great city has its fair share of derelicts, but given my experience in Martinsville, I found them sane in comparison. I watched derelicts in Richmond slobber all over themselves and dance the streets in cardboard crowns, but never once did I see the equivalent of a crackhead dressed as a pirate. It’s a matter of quality, not quantity.

What exactly drives Martinsville’s ungodly crazyperson surplus? The answer can’t be as simple as a diseased economy. My current theory premises that the city was founded on a Native American burial ground. If you have any theories of your own, theories that aren’t inspired by a 1980s horror film starring Craig T. Nelson, let me know. Please, for the love of General Joseph Martin, let me know.

Martinsville Morals: Crack Pirate says “Stay in school, else join me crew! Arr!”

Next Time, in Martinsville: “The dirty (young) girls of youth group!” or “In the company of cubs!”

Charles Smith is a regular New River Voice columnist who grew up in, yeah, you guessed it, Martinsville, but now lives in Radford. For the next couple months, his “Martinsville Stories” will be appearing in the Voice every other Friday.