Sanctimonious Slumlord

If Tracy Mayberry’s life were a country song, it wouldn’t be sung by the ersatz Hat Acts or New Country bunnies currently infesting the airwaves. It would be sung by the old cast of Hee Haw, who, for all their hokum, exhibited a certain genius for tear-in-your-beer lamentations with “Gloom, Despair and Agony On Me.” The song’s most poignant lyric went: “If it weren’t for bad luck, / I’d have no luck at all.” For as long as she can remember, that’s the only luck Tracy Mayberry has known.

Now 36 years old, Tracy was unlucky at 13, when she married her first husband who beat her, then left her after she slugged him in the eye. By the age of 16, she’d met her current husband, Charles. A second-grade dropout, he hasn’t had much luck either. Together, they started an unlucky family. Charles brought along four kids from a previous marriage. They had two of their own, then adopted two more — the unlucky offspring of more unlucky parents. The five kids currently living in their house suffer every malady from retardation to epileptic seizures. But luckily for the Mayberrys, they get $ 1,536 in monthly disability checks. It’s the only money coming in, as 51-year-old Charles, a tobacco and timber cutter, is unable to ply his trade since suffering congestive heart failure five years ago. Herself a tobacco cutter, Tracy is also unable to work since her diabetic stroke. While she’s without a vocation (or welfare or food stamps, which she’s too proud to take), she has a new hobby: injecting herself in the stomach with two shots of insulin every day.

It might seem the Mayberrys’ luck couldn’t turn any worse. It did. Eighteen months ago, they escaped a cramped three-bedroom trailer in Cookeville, Tennessee, and moved to nearby Carthage, 50 miles east of Nashville. Here, Tracy thought her family lucky when they secured a $ 400-per-month four-bedroom rambler. But when she wrote out her rent check, her luck turned for the worse — she discovered her new landlord was Vice President Al Gore.

Not that Gore was meddlesome. Though Tracy makes her checks out directly to “Al Gore,” and while the Mayberrys’ house sits only 150 yards or so from that of Carthage’s Washington, D.C.-bred native son, Gore has been extremely hands off. So hands off, in fact, that when Tracy complained to Gore’s property managers that the plaster was coming off the walls, the linoleum was peeling off the kitchen floor, the basin of the bathroom sink was a constipated sludge puddle, the guts of one toilet tank had to be held together with Sunbeam bread bag twisties, and both bathroom toilets overflowed — when they flushed at all — (making the whole house smell, in Charles’s formulation, “like sheee-it”), the managers managed not to fix anything at all.

Over the course of a year, Mayberry says she complained some 30 times to Gore’s property managers, Charles and Audrey Elrod, a husband and wife team who have been in the employ of the Gore family (going back to Al’s late father) for 12 years. The Elrods aren’t some sort of distant managerial subcontractor. They actually live on the acreage of Pauline Gore, Al’s mother. Audrey manages the staff of what Tracy’s kids call “The Pink Mansion,” Pauline’s house on the hill across the Caney Fork River, a view of which the Mayberrys enjoy when they pop an Icehouse beer and kick back next to the belching duct-taped air-conditioning window unit on their front porch.

Tracy hadn’t had much luck getting any response from Gore entities, but last month, when the Post Office delivered a notice saying she had a registered letter from Al Gore, she thought she might have caught a break. After all, it wouldn’t seem too tall an order for the second most powerful man in the world to make sure the Mayberrys’ toilets flushed properly. He could probably even get a good deal on parts, since his wife Tipper was a shareholder in her father’s plumbing supplies business (an asset that Gore’s 1998 financial disclosure report valued at between $ 100,000 and $ 250,000).

But when Tracy went to pick up the letter, it wasn’t actually from Gore. It was an eviction notice from Audrey, written on Gore Realty letterhead, spelled “Gore Reality.” The reality of Gore Realty, admits Audrey, is that there isn’t any such company, only the two rental houses Al Gore owns. “That’s just something we call it,” she says. According to Gore’s most recent disclosure reports, he grosses $ 4,800 annually from the stopped-up sinkhole that is the Mayberrys’ home.

The eviction letter stated that because of the unsanitary condition of the septic system and the amount of time it would take to fix, “We believe that it would be to everyone’s advantage if you could find somewhere else to move. This seems to be an ongoing problem with the plumbing and it is not in the best interest or health of the people living there for us to continue renting the house.” Mayberry says that Audrey told her the Secret Service would be taking over the house, an assertion Audrey now backs away from. “Oh, that was just something I came up with,” she says. “[The Gores] never said nothing about that.”

True to form, Al Gore never said anything at all — at least not until Tracy Mayberry called Nashville’s NewsChannel 5 on June 2, to give them a tour of the dilapidated house from which “slumlord” Gore was evicting her. The next day, Tracy received a call from the force behind Gore Reality, the vice president himself. He apologized profusely, telling Mayberry he’d known nothing about the problems. To make it up to her, and to defuse media interest, he promised to have the place repaired, to charge her no rent until it was, to drop the eviction, and even to put the Mayberry family up somewhere while the renovations were underway if they so desired. By the end of the conversation, they were even talking dinner invites, with Tracy promising to make fried chicken, cornbread, and a peach cobbler. (She may have gotten carried away — when I ask if she’d really like to have Gore over for dinner, she says, “No . . . He invited himself, I didn’t invite him. I really don’t care if I meet him or not.”)

As damage control goes, Gore’s strategy largely worked. The Mayberry story was nearly over before it began. Network newscasts ignored it. Most major papers ran wire copy. So did the Nashville Tennessean, where Gore once worked as a reporter, and whose Goreophile editor, Frank Sutherland, has appeared in a Gore campaign video.

If it were possible for Dickens to mount a comeback and this time go Southern Gothic, a stop by the Mayberry homestead would give him a good leg up on source material. The house sits a mere chaw-hock from the Gores’, and is nearly as close to the Golden Nugget Lounge, a kicker bar that promises karaoke and one-dollar longnecks for the ladies. Around the perimeter of the Mayberrys’ medium-sized yard is a barbed-wire cattle fence, a gentle reminder to their children not to wander off onto the Gore property where they could get intercepted by Secret Service agents or electrocuted on another interior fence. Like most rural southern settings, the Mayberrys’ yard exhibits a healthy amalgam of cars and dogs. In the driveway, there’s their son’s beat-up ’91 Camaro, Charles’s ’79 Bonneville with its festive coat of gray primer, a 1990 Olds Cutlass, and Tracy’s Ford pickup featuring the bumper sticker “Women come and go, but you can rely on a truck” (the Mayberrys have relied on theirs since 1988).

On the dog side of the ledger, there’s Miss Lady the boxer, Jake the pit bull/rottweiler mix, and four others who are tethered to trees and other immovable objects with thick timber chains. The dogs subsist on “fat meat” donated by a charitable butcher. “Sometimes they eat better than I do,” says Tracy. “My husband says bologna is a poor man’s steak.”

As for kids, the place is crawling with them. There’s 25-year-old Linda, who Tracy says is retarded, though she doesn’t seem it (“Just talk to her awhile,” Tracy encourages). There’s also 14-year-old Anna, who is a self-described “maniac depressive,” and who also experiences such severe agoraphobia that her teachers drop her lessons off at the house. Ten-year-old John, who sports an orange tank top and no shoes, is 5’3″ and 211 lbs, says sister Anna, who adds, with clockwork timing, that he’s on a “see-food diet . . . if he sees it — he eats it.”

John remains unruffled. “I could live off cheeseburgers,” he says, though he often makes do with fried potatoes and pinto beans when money gets tight — and it always does. The Mayberrys adopted 9-year-old Candace — not knowing that she’d have occasional seizures, be mildly retarded, and be prone to making mischief at school, such as when she told her teachers that Tracy had given birth to twins, killed one, and given the other away. Last up is 4-year-old Jordan, a hard-boned shirtless jumping bean, who was also adopted from a mother who drank and took drugs throughout her pregnancy, afflicting Jordan with fetal alcohol syndrome, attention deficit disorder, and God knows what else. “He’s been on the Ritalin,” says Tracy. “Sometimes it calms him down, other times it’ll run him crazy.”

Tracy sits at her kitchen table in an aquamarine Winnie-the-Pooh T-shirt, black sweats, and Birkenstocks. Since she spoke out against Gore, she’s received several abusive letters from his supporters. One called her an “asshole Republican” (though she’s always voted Democrat). Another said she looked like a frog. “I don’t wear makeup that often,” she says. “I don’t dress to please anybody. Where can I afford to go?”

Though Tracy doesn’t own much — not even a full set of teeth — she does have all the accouterments of a professional chain smoker, including her Marlboro 100s and a cigarette pouch with a side holster from which she draws her pink lighter. Husband Charles sits next to her, decked to his facial stubble in faded denim. He doesn’t say much, and when he does, he’s difficult to understand. Instead, he lets his black hat do the talking. It says, “I can’t take it anymore.” And indeed he can’t, as Charles’s nerves are shot, and he adjourns to a back bedroom where he falls asleep to the accompaniment of “Busted” from Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison album.

As Tracy gives a tour of her house, she speaks of its other unnamed occupants — the rather robust arachnid population. Tracy says they’ve killed all kinds of spiders, from black widows to fiddle backs. In recent months, they’ve bought nearly 20 cans of Raid; they activate it, then go off to hunt for other houses. While we are standing in Tracy’s living room, a large flying cockroach lands on the wall above my head. Tracy takes after it with her ever-ready flyswatter, but she doesn’t have the wingspan. She hands it to me, and I make contact with the cockroach, dropping it to the floor — we think. We hunt for a body for several minutes, but then call off the search party, reasoning that even if we killed it, there’re more where it came from.

While various repairmen scurry about the house under the eye of property manager Charles Elrod, it’s clear they have quite a job ahead of them. Manhole-sized swaths of linoleum are missing from the kitchen floor, though the Elrods, along with the Gores’ local lawyer, James Bass, not-so-subtly insinuate that the damage was done by the Mayberrys, since the floor coverings were replaced before they moved in 1998. (Never mind that the allegedly new linoleum pattern looks to have been out of style since 1978, that the size of the holes suggests the Mayberrys would have had to drop a jackhammer from a forklift, and that the faux-marble countertops, supposedly replaced around the same time, are in immaculate condition.)

In the hallways, there are fault lines in the ceiling and peeling plaster bordered by yellow rings, perhaps from old water damage. The paint in some places is mismatched, but it wouldn’t make much difference if it were uniform, as it bears enough scuff marks to look like the inside of a handball court. A red-faced, sweaty Plumber Bob goes to town in the bathrooms, snaking and plunging, and dodging a chirpy local television reporter who wants to know if she can get some footage of Tracy “talking around the toilet.”

As we huddle inside the house, we hear the chopping of helicopter blades. “Momma, it’s Al Gore!” exclaims Anna. We all pile out into the yard, tending to believe Anna, since one doesn’t see much helicopter traffic in Carthage — there aren’t many places to land, what with all the Kissing Dutch Children lawn ornaments. The helicopter hovers, then disappears without revealing its passenger, but it is clearly not Al Gore. At the moment, he is in New York, promoting his “family agenda” at a $ 15,000-per-year Upper East Side preschool. He gets help from Rosie O’Donnell, who tells the assembly, “I’m very fortunate that I am very, very rich.”

Soon after the false alarm, Plumber Bob and Elrod, who looks as if he coifs his hair with high-viscosity motor oil, haul one of the perpetually clogged toilets out into the yard. They leave a trail of water throughout the house that they don’t bother swabbing up. While Plumber Bob goes after the toilet with sharp objects and a garden hose, an ugly thing happens. I’m standing in the front yard talking to Gore’s man on the scene, and he begins casting aspersions on the Mayberrys. Says Elrod: “I’ve been aggravated to death . . . They trashed the house . . . When they moved in . . . it was completely new inside and out.” While Elrod says Gore operatives told him that “we’re supposed to be nice,” he later claims he even told Tipper Gore — “I think it was in an e-mail” — that the Mayberrys were responsible for the disrepair. (A Tipper Gore spokesperson says she’s heard no such thing.)

Elrod goes on to suggest that 14 people are living in the house, though only 7 do. He says the toilets have not been cleaned, though Tracy tells me she cleans her bowls at least once a week, and I spot cleaning bleach in her bathroom. He suggests that the disrepair of the walls is their fault, though the peeling plaster, for instance, is higher than any of the children’s natural reach, and young Jordan would have had to launch a shotput to cause the cracks in the ceiling. Elrod even expresses regret that they weren’t evicted: “I think it would be in their best interest to find another place to move.”

It exhausts credulity to believe that the Elrods, Al Gore’s property managers of 12 years, are speaking autonomously in this potentially incendiary situation, even as Gore apologizes and makes restitution. Letting surrogates attack, after all, is a familiar Gore campaign strategy. Gore also has a political interest in appearing not to know anything about his own rental property, particularly since Tracy Mayberry says the Elrods told her no repairs could be made without Gore’s consent. She says that she implored the Elrods, on no less than five occasions, to contact Gore directly. And a few months ago, she says, she even went so far as to call the vice president’s Carthage office to complain. (She was referred right back to Gore’s property managers.) Still, one might be tempted to give Gore the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he has no time for such minutiae, as he busies himself speechifying about compassion.

But when I tell Tracy Mayberry what Gore’s surrogates are saying, she is no longer prepared to accept his pleas of ignorance.

“Boy that makes me mad,” she says. “All I ask for is to get my house fixed, and they start attackin’ me, sayin’ I’m nasty. . . . You know [Gore] has to know something about it. . . . I don’t have to put up with it and I’m not going to.”

A day after visiting Tracy, I call for a progress report on the repairs. The first time her husband flushed the toilet, she says, it seeped water all over the floor. And, she says, the linoleum guys inadvertently created two big dents in her kitchen floor by failing to patch up holes before they laid the new covering. Tracy Mayberry has given up hope of getting lucky enough ever to see her house repaired. So she’s made another plan. “I’m packin’ my stuff up,” she says, “and they can take this house and go to hell with it.”

In a couple of days, Mayberry says, she will drop her children off at her mother’s trailer, while she and her husband sleep in their truck. When they receive their disability checks on the first of the month, they’ll begin looking for a new place to live. “We ain’t got the money for motels right now,” she says matter-of-factly.

As for Gore, he might not want to count on Tracy’s vote in November, or even on a taste of that cornbread and peach cobbler. “The way I consider it,” she says, “Gore can kiss my ass.”

Matt Labash is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD. He took the accompanying photographs of the Mayberry residence.