Barney and friends

Barney knocked hard on the door. A muffled voice yelled from inside; a command that barely came across as "come in". It was Spoon's voice. Spoon is a tall, thin man, bent slightly, by time and by a war that interrupted, then alleviated him of his college education. He lives in the part of the complex that he and other long time residents call "the ghetto", just across the lot from the "the suburbs" and across the street from the Drake Motel, on Murfreesboro Road.

Barney opened the door. "You got company," he grumbled. Spoon rose as the door opened and with a characteristic soft smile, invited us in.
As a young man, he spent his senior prom night here at this same place (before it became affordable housing). "It was 1965", he says, "Willie Nelson and my man George Jones, and Waylon, all them guys used to hang out on the porches across the street there, at the Drake. They didn't need no stretch limousines or bodyguards then. They was just people." For the last thirteen years, "one of the originals", Spoon has made his home in this little rip tide of humanity called Mercury Courts.