No one knows who V.I.V. is but it’s something like an honor to be featured in her underground newsletter that finds its way onto magazine racks all over Ladoga before management throws them away or they’re all snatched up by curious readers who look to V.I.V. for the stories she features about noteworthy citizens of the community as well as the abuses and failures of local political and community figures. Interested people say the newsletter started showing up around the year 2000, but that could just be people romanticizing it and linking it to the turn of the century, the millennia, to give it the force of historical relevance. I wasn’t aware of V.I.V.’s newsletter until recently when I was talking to the man who operates Ladoga’s animal shelter. He grew suspicious of my intentions when I showed up there unsolicited without an animal and no intentions of taking one home with me. “You ask a lot of questions for someone not looking for a pet,” he said. “Are you gonna put me in that V.I.V. thing? Are you V.I.V.?” I asked him to explain. “The newsletter. The one from last month had an article about animal control, or the lack of animal control, in the city. Are you doing follow up? Ohh, I can’t wait to tell my daughter I’m gonna be in the next V.I.V.” Despite my insistence that I didn’t know who or what V.I.V. was, the man from the animal shelter winked at me and promised to keep my secret. “I feel like I’m meeting Bruce Wayne. My daughter was so sure that you’d be a woman, but I had a feeling that you’d be a man. I won’t say anything though, I don’t want to ruin it for her. You know, she’s going to study journalism because of your newsletter. She’s all excited about it. She sent you an article a couple weeks ago, to that contributors’ email, about her history teacher, and she drags me all around town looking for your next issue to see if you used her piece. You really should use her piece.” The conversation was one sided from that point on and I knew that I wouldn’t get him to talk naturally about his job and the prevalence of stray animals in the city, so I ended the conversation. But not before I asked him for a copy of the V.I.V. newsletter that he kept going on about. “You lost your backups or something?” He said laughing and grabbed a crumpled booklet out of his desk. “This one’s been floating around my office for a while. My daughter’s name is Abigail Strickland. Please use her article in your next newsletter, it would mean the world to her.” I guess he figured that I only asked for the newsletter to maintain an illusion of ignorance, but I had honestly never encountered it before. I guess I never pay attention to magazine racks when I go to stores; and frankly, it was rare that I would read print magazines or newsletters anyway.
The newsletter is actually called “This, and Other Things” and the editor is identified as V.I.V. with no explanation of the acronym. It looked handmade; about six sheets of 8×11 printer paper stapled together along the left side. There were no pictures, but there were a few hand drawn graphics and a comic on the last page. Most of the writing seemed to be done by V.I.V. and there was at least one story by a person with an actual name who was identified as a Ladoga resident. The whole thing felt disappointingly familiar.
I called up Wes to see if he had ever heard of V.I.V. before and he said that he hadn’t. “But I told you, interesting stuff happens in Ladoga all the time. We’re not the only ones trying to write it down. Its validation if anything.” I had a hard time taking it as good news. Up to that point, I was really only writing for the fun it, the chance to stay sharp, and I hadn’t thought of publishing the stories anywhere, but the newsletter made me happy that I hadn’t tried. I would just look like the guy who tried to sell out an underground hero who had been serving the community off and on for about fifteen years. I felt like a cheap knock off of the real thing, and it wasn’t the first time. The first time was when I met my door number two, alternate reality self in Wes, and then this V.I.V. appeared out of nowhere. And her work seemed to be much more astute than mine, like each issue coalesced around things most relevant to a current discussion of the problems Ladogans faced. She seem to gloss over the east/west divide, This was a publication for the entire town and it was clear that anything the publication discussed was pertinent to everyone. Some say it was This that really got city hall off their asses and committed to the fire ant extermination. Her issue about the ant problem first appeared in 2013 and there were several pieces about the various ways people in rural east Ladoga were being affected. It seems that she was predicting the spread of the nuisance and imploring everyone to pay attention before disasters happened, like the relocation of the state high school baseball 2A championship that city manager Diane Marsh had fought hard to host in the city. The field that the LHS Hurricanes used was swarming with ants and the entire pitcher’s mound was an ant hill. V.I.V.’s ant issue featured a short story that I had never seen before called “Plague of the Ants” by a guy named Fray Bartolomeo de las Casa, an old world Spanish colonialist who apparently changed his ideologies about European encroachment in the would be Americas after witnessing the brutality of conquest. More than anything, V.I.V. made me feel like my aesthetic was lacking; her newsletter was packed with allusions that at first seemed so left field, that quickly snapped into focus upon looking at the real life stories she featured. One story was about an old man who lived in a run down house all the way at the eastern edge of the city and he was quoted as saying, “I hope [the ants] get into everything, I hope everybody knows what I been going through out here. The city ignores folks out here, don’t feel no obligation to me, but them ants’ll show ’em to ignore me.” The old man’s indictment included leaders of the east Ladoga community who were known to be generous to the needy, most notably the local pastors of churches that had organized drives in the past to benefit poor families during holidays, but who ignored the old man and told him that he should just move to a more central location. “Everybody gets up in arms when there’s no one there to help them. The East Side loves to scapegoat the west for the ways they ‘neglect’ us over here, but as soon as we get a chance to be better than somebody else, we do the same thing. To hell with the whole town. I hope the ants eat ’em alive.”
It’s easy to dismiss a rag that only appears on newsstands until someone notices and throws it away, but once you open it up it’s hard to put down, if you care of course.
“You should try to solve the V.I.V. mystery,” Wes told me. Even though I’m older than him, sometimes I let him guide me to things to take my mind off of whatever disappointment I have in my life. He is a pro at distracting himself I guess. “Maybe we can contribute for her.” That was all well and good, but more than anything I just wanted to know who she was, if she was a she, and if she did it all by herself. And if she was happy giving it away for free, or occasionally seeing it in garbage cans.
With no real leads except a contributor’s email, I silently accepted the mission of finding V.I.V. My step one was trying to talk to people who may have talked to her, but most people featured in the newsletter recently, told me that they had corresponded by email with V.I.V. I couldn’t imagine that the old man from the edge of town who ushered in the era of the ants would use a computer, so I tried to find him. He told me that he had talked to a reporter from Ladoga’s daily newspaper a few years back, or that’s where she said she was from. “I ain’t never seen myself in that paper.” He said that she had introduced herself as Vickie but he didn’t know much else about her. He did tell me that when the city finally got around to the extermination that was supervised by the City Manager, his property was the first to be treated. When I visited the offices of the local paper, no one knew a woman named Vicky that worked there.
I have to know V.I.V. Sure, it was efforts coordinated out of city hall that finally brought the ant problem under control, but it seems that V.I.V. had rubbed someone’s face in the ants hard enough to make them realize that something needed to be done. She was the epitome of everything I thought I had lost, a voice that could truly speak for those who might as well be mute to the establishment. I’m still jealous, but not in a hateful way. My current strategy for tracking down V.I.V. is to submit things to her contributors’ email, hopefully she’ll like what I’m doing enough to contact me.
It’s a very noble thing, I guess, to be ambitious enough to create something that no one asked for and then manage to gain a following, regardless how small. I never thought about doing something just because I could. I think that blogs can be a waste of time for most people because they easily devolve into emotional rants. At my core, I guess I’m a reporter. I’d rather focus my attention on some spectacle and describe it, lately I am prone to philosophising, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing depending on the reader. Maybe I stopped writing after college because I thought that there were enough people already doing it. I missed it because I like to think things through, to figure things out. Maybe it’s because I think so much that I can find a way to be unhappy with the stability that I’ve found with my own family. It’s selfish bitterness, really, to think that I’m missing out on something because of my family. I would definitely find a way to be unhappy in any situation I find myself because I’m not comfortable with the idea of settling. I hate the idea that I could look back with regrets. My father raised me to work hard. He loves to remind me of all the sacrifices he’d made for his kids and I still have a strong sense that I should be great and successful, not only for myself, but to honor his sacrifice. If I ever feel like I could be doing more, I feel like an ungrateful slacker.
It’s been a while now since I found the newsletter, many months since I started sending emails to V.I.V., and I’m still hoping she (or he, or maybe it’s multiple people) will contact me. She’d be an interesting person to talk to and I know she could point me to stories in the corners of Ladoga that I’d never find on my own. I’m determined to solve the V.I.V. mystery.
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