One crisp, cloudless October morning, Jay Johanson, 27, carried a suitcase out to his hand-me-down BMW, got in, and started driving, filled with nothing but a certain dubious inclination. He drove and drove and drove, ten non-stop hours on interstate 81. Then, somewhere in southwest Virginia, surrounded by all the splendor of that country's autumn, he saw an exit ramp for a place called Savage and, titillated, veered across three lanes of traffic, nearly causing a terrifically bad accident, to take it. In this way he was deposited onto a sinuous two-lane highway with busted-up guardrails and an uncanny amount of roadkill that he dodged for six long miles, arriving at last at an impossibly ugly town with a sign greeting him thusly: WELCOME TO SAVAGE, THE HEART OF APPALACHIA. Spray-painted beneath these words were two more: EAT ME. Lordy, it was better than he'd dared hope for.
He drove into town, passing leaning clapboard houses, cinderblock laundromats, a pack of dirty-faced boys on Huffies whose blank-faced stares he returned as he motored by. He turned corners on potholed streets with no curbs or sidewalks, the BMW's suspension rattling and banging, the transmission screaming as he fought through the gears. An ancient black man sitting on a careening front porch began to wave, then stopped. A burned-out house with two satellite dishes and what appeared to be a tombstone in its front yard appeared after he passed the volunteer fire station. It was three blocks off Main Street, though, that he found the thing that had been calling to him in his sleep: a shot-to-hell 19th-century Victorian house with a cardboard sign in its window reading APARTMENT FOR RENT. This was truly a city of signs.
