Council Candidate Exposes Town to Views (and Other Things)

If you should find yourself downtown in this beautiful Southern Appalachian city, and if you should come upon a young man in nothing but a black satin G-string, be careful what you say.

You might be talking to the newest city councilman.

His name is Ukiah Morrison, and he’s one of 18 candidates for three hotly contested seats on the Asheville City Council. After a rollicking campaign season, today is the long-awaited primary. And though Morrison isn’t expected to win, place or show, expectations for his poor performance seem more a product of citywide prayers than polls.

At a turning point in this city’s history, when Asheville is grappling with what sort of place it will become--the next Aspen or the next Haight-Ashbury?--few issues have captivated or angered the public like Morrison, a 26-year-old busboy, stripper, ex-cop, Army veteran, frequent drug user and hardcore political animal.

“I won’t waste my valuable time, or your valuable time, talking about him,” says Asheville Mayor Leni Sitnick, who then spends the next several minutes decrying Morrison.

A Candidate Who Is the Talk of Town

“He’s a joke,” she says, sifting through a stack of phone messages from tabloid TV producers and Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” all eager to talk about Morrison. “At first I thought he’d be good, because he’d drum up interest. But he’s so in-your-face, so arrogant, so immature.”

It was bad enough when Morrison was just a public nuisance, sunbathing quasi-naked in Asheville’s beloved Pack Square, where church groups and office workers and unsuspecting families gather each day to eat sandwiches and gaze at the pale blue mountains.

Apparently, someone made the mistake of telling Morrison that North Carolina’s Supreme Court had ruled it legal to expose one’s buttocks. Suddenly, there he was, stretched out in the grass, his nose in a book, his bottom topside.

Some days he’d do more than lie around. Ever civic-minded, he’d hand out flowers to tourists, or pick up trash, wearing little more than a sock.

A Mapplethorpe version of a mountaineer, Morrison made people mad no matter what he did. Tires screeched. Pedestrians gawked. Police gathered. Apart from warning Morrison about the dangers of long-term exposure to the sun, however, no one could do a thing.

In time, Morrison began painting his upper torso with ads promoting his services as a stripper, and the mayor smelled a loophole. “I thought we could get him for posting an illegal sign,” she says.

But there was no such legal recourse available.

When he wasn’t offending official Asheville in public, Morrison enjoyed offending them in private. Fascinated by the inner workings of government, he religiously attended meetings of the City Council, browbeating members on matters close to his heart, like the treatment of Asheville’s unusually large and visible homeless population.

Currently, Morrison lives in his car.

At one meeting, Morrison and others tried to put the subject of legalizing marijuana before the City Council. An ugly debate ensued. One councilman stormed out. Feeling slighted, and weary of watching from the sidelines, Morrison took aim at the man’s seat, paying a $5 fee he could ill afford and registering as a candidate.

“There’s a lot of support,” he says, sitting in the late afternoon sunshine on the edge of Pack Square’s reflecting pool. “When I’m lying out here, cars come by and honk. Girls yell, ‘Ukiah, I’m voting for yooou!’ ”

Born Ron Mathews in Long Beach, Calif., Morrison came to Asheville two years ago after the drowning death of his 2-year-old daughter. In fact, he says, he brought his daughter’s ashes with him and disposed of them here in Pack Square, although he won’t tell exactly where. “Let’s just say this is my sacred ground,” he says.

While discussing his life and campaign, Morrison begins to get comfortable, casually disrobing as if he were about to take a dip. Due to the lateness of the hour, the coolness of the air, or the timidity of his interviewer, he stops abruptly at his belt.

With long flowing hair, a black eye from a recent bar fight and a red tattoo on his pumped-up chest that reads, “My Wild Love Went Riding,” Morrison can’t help standing out. Then again, in this city of 67,000, home to a growing subculture of free spirits, folk artists, eternal hippies, wayward teens and anti-government types, he doesn’t stand out as much as he would elsewhere.

“The day I drove in here, there was just a feeling,” he says. “People walked up and introduced themselves to me with a hug.”

For once, he says, he belonged.

A Mecca for Nonconformists

In fact, he seems right at home in this election, too. There is room for everyone in the crowded field of candidates, from strait-laced Reaganites to libertarian activists, from a body-building ex-Marine cited twice for drunk driving, to a former secretary in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

The sheer number of candidates reflects not just the variety of issues facing Asheville, but the diversity of the population, according to Milton Ready, a professor at UNC-Asheville who wrote a history of the city. “The cast of characters relates to Asheville’s character,” he says.

This is that rare Appalachian city, Ready says, where blacks, gays, New Agers and nonconformists of all stripes are welcome. Locals like to call Asheville the Greenwich Village of the South, or the Sedona of the East. No matter the nickname, it’s a mecca for eccentrics, and Morrison means to be their bare standard-bearer.

“If you don’t like me,” he says, “you don’t like a lot of people around here.”

Should he not make the cut today, or not win come November, Morrison says he won’t quit. He’ll keep lying in the tall grass, waiting to pounce again.

“I’ve got nothing to do for the next 80 years,” he says, “but fight The Man.”