On this day, last year:
"She needed a lover and at the same time a lover was not what she needed. The need of a lover was, after all, quite a secondary thing. She needed to be loved, to be long and quietly and patiently loved. To be sure she is a grotesque, but then all the people in the world are grotesques. We all need to be loved. What would cure her would cure the
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"We were all part of what we liked to call the
Richmond Underground," Blackiston said. "I had enough
that I could help Jones or Amlong when they needed
help, and lots of times we traded a dinner or a bottle
for a painting. I could help them get back on their
feet or to pay rent for studio space or to pay a
bill." He lived for years on a houseboat called Shanty
that he kept docked in the Kanawha Canal; he rode out
the flood of 1972 in it. He and Lily, his fourth and
last wife, would take potshots at the rats and to
scare off the drunks in the alleys. And there's the
story of Lily taking potshots at Lester.
"She got mad and started shooting at us," Blackiston
said, describing the incident as just another party
turned sour. In January 1965, a Richmond judge
sentenced Blackiston to a year in jail and a $5 fine
for wounding an intruder. "He was coming at me up the
steps with a machete and a shotgun," Blackiston said
last week, ferreting through his papers for the
gubernatorial pardon he received in July 1980.
"I aimed for his heart, but I missed." Now he
struggles on the phone over an order of green tea,
grunting in pain, his body a pincussion of ancient
wounds. And the booming voice fights for wind and
cadence when he reads a favorite piece he wrote about
a Leesburg churchyard cemetery. "This churchyard where
the battle ceases . . . " His own passing will be more
in keeping with what he described as his "life on the
edge." "I want to be sent out on a boat across the
Chesapeake Bay that is set on fire and just sinks with
what's left of me in it," he said. "It will be like
the old Indians on the Plains who just got left behind
when they couldn't keep up to hunt anymore. "I want
people to be singing on shore. No humming." Contact
staff writer Bill McKelway at
bmckelway@timesdispatch.
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