memoir

Vaudeville Meets William Faulkner Meets The Hallmark Channel

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Vaudeville Meets William Faulkner Meets The Hallmark Channel

On Friday, I had my first interview involving my new book Long Ago Last Summer.  Lorne Chambers, who owns the Folly Current and has an MFA in writing from the College of Charleston, met me at Chico Feo where we chatted about creative writing in general and Long Ago in particular over a couple of beers. 

Occasionally, I didn’t know how to respond to Lorne’s excellent questions because Long Ago is such a strange book that it can’t be easily categorized.  When you’re trying to sell something, it’s helpful to have a clear, simple message like it’s “a coming-of-age novel” or a “dystopian sci-fi epic” or “a romantic comedy.”  With Long Ago Last Summer it’s more like Vaudeville meets William Faulkner meets The Hallmark Channel.

In essence, it’s a memoir, which is embarrassing enough because of the egocentricity inherent in thinking my life is so noteworthy that it warrants being shared with others.  And in many ways, my life has been unadventurous. I enjoyed a long lasting, loving marriage for 38 years, a stable teaching career for 34 years, reared two successful sons, owned a succession of dogs, remarried as a widower and gained a remarkable stepdaughter. I’m well-travelled, I guess, but that’s not unusual in this day and age.  To adapt a cliche: my adulthood has not been much to write home about as far as excitement goes.

On the other hand, I grew up in the segregated South, a very dark, fascinating place, a fallen civilization forever picking its scabs but then licking those newly opened wounds.  The little Lowcountry town of Summerville where I grew up had two (what I’m going to uncharitably call) village idiots, among other eccentrics, like the old crone Miss Capers, religious fanatics galore, creepy good humor men, and more alcoholics per capita than most places this side of the Betty Ford Center.

Much of the book deals with an awakening consciousness that develops in a Southern Gothic setting, or, as the back cover puts it, Long Ago Last Summer “embodies the profound paradoxes of Southern culture against a landscape dotted with antebellum plantations, shotgun shacks, suburban subdivisions, Pentecostal churches, and juke joints.” 

However, Long Ago is not a typical memoir in that it’s fragmentary, a collage of sorts, a mosaic, a smorgasbord or gumbo that runs the gamut from lighthearted vignettes to bleak accounts of terrible wrongdoing.  If I were going to wax hyper-pretentious, I’d call it neo-Modernistic because like Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” it pieces together fragments to create a narrative held together by recurring themes.  In this case, Sothern Gothicism, alienation, insomnia, and the vagaries of memory and reality. 

Short fiction, verse, essays, and parodies that can stand alone out of their context occur chronologically to trace my life from its beginnings in 1952 to the present. Long Ago is, as stated in the preface, “a guided tour of the haunted houses and cobwebbed attics of my youth” followed by my college experience, my meeting and falling in love with Judy Birdsong, her illness and death, and my finding new love after her departure.  In fact, included in the collection is a villanelle written by my wife Caroline that deals with Judy’s lingering presence in our marriage.  In some cases, fiction is juxtaposed with non-fiction so that it’s not necessarily clear which is which. 

In other words, Long Ago Last Summer is really weird, like its subject matter. 

I’m appearing next week on Fox News 24’s midday show to attempt to explain all of this to viewers who may or may not have heard of TS Eliot and/or Modernism or vaudeville for that matter.

Also, weather permitting, I’m reading brief samples Monday, May 26 around 7:20 at George Fox’s open mic Soap Box at Chico Feo. 

So, thoughts and prayers, y’all. I need them.

Little Baby Blues: 1953 Edition

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Little Baby Blues: 1953 Edition

On 14 December 1952, a rare snowy day in Summerville, South Carolina, Dr. Howard Snyder, aided and abbeted by forceps, yanked me from my mother’s womb into a world of relative woe.  The procedure flattened my head, which resulted in cephalohematoma, a condition in which blood pools under a newborn’s scalp. My father had to leave that afternoon to return to Clemson via a Greyhound bus.  When the lady sitting next to him asked why he looked so sad, he replied, “My wife just gave birth to a seven pound, eight ounce monkey.”  

As a child and teenager, I heard this anecdote on more than one occasion, which would elicit a cackle from my mother, who in so many words agreed that indeed I was a hideous newborn. However, she was quick to assure me that in a couple of weeks I was so beautiful that when she pushed my stroller around Colonial Lake, strangers stopped her to admire my beauty. 

I took solace in my mom’s stroller story as a child, not realizing that praising a baby’s looks is a common practice of adults when they run across almost any infant. On Facebook, I often encounter the red puffy yet wrinkled faces of newborns who are deemed “beautiful” or “adorable” by scores of friends of the parents. 

Meanwhile, elsewhere, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg sat in a courtroom being grilled by Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s mentor.  My first full year, 1953, marked the feverous height of the Red Scare, back when the Russians were our enemies rather than our friends (or at least our President’s friend).[1] This collective commiephobia spread, appropriately enough, during an epidemic of polio. 

Trump and Cohn

In 1953, R&B had not made it to the mainstream, and rock-n-roll was in utero.  Every artist but one in Billboard’s top 30 singles of 1953 is white, mostly male crooners and female sopranos. Overly orchestrated instrumentals were also popular. The number one hit that year is “The Song from the Moulin Rouge” by Percy Faith and His Orchestra, a song so saccharine sounding that your ears might develop diabetes if you listen to more than twice. 

I’ve never heard of loads of these hitmakers like Pee Wee Hunt, Frank Chacksfield, Richard Hayman, Joni James. By far, the coolest song in that top 30 is from the one Black performer, South Carolina’s own Eartha Kitt, singing and purring “C’est si Bon” en francais.  She later was cast as Cat Woman in the Batman TV series. 

On the other hand, I have not only heard of but seen all of the top movies of ‘53, except for The Naked Spur. I’ve seen From Here to Eternity and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes at least twice, I’ve also watched Roman Holiday and Stalag 17.  Disney’s Peter Pan was one of my favorite movies in childhood, especially because the leader of the Lost Boys was, like me, a red head.

Nevertheless, despite the general awfulness of 1953, being born around then ended up being a propitious time to begin life’s journey. My parents, who had grown up during the Great Depression, wanted my siblings and me to have a better life than they suffered yet didn’t monitor our every move, allowing us to roam freely, unencumbered with water bottles or walkie talkies, the ’60’s equivalent cell phones. 

And by our adolescence in the mid ’60s, the music got ridiculously good, though we feared getting drafted and going to Nam, but by then the war was winding down and a draft lottery was in force. Compared today, college tuitions were dirt cheap. I could earn enough money in the summers to cover tuition.

However, I must say, for me at least, it’s a melancholy situation in my twilight years to witness the spectacle of lawlessness and corruption foisted on the Republic by Roy Cohn’s mentee, who obviously, as far as Machiavellianism is concerned, was an A+ student. 

C’est la vie, as Eartha might sing.

I’ll leave you with the number 1 hit of 1953.

[1] Fun facts to know as share: Roy Cohn, who in addition to being one of the prosecutors at the Rosenberg trial, also served as chief counsel for Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts, a term Donald Trump appropriated during his first term to describe investigations targeting him for such acts of malfeasance like storing stolen classified documents in bathrooms and paying hush money to porn stars. 

A Spotty Religious Education

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My mother’s people were Baptists, serious Baptists, no drinking, no playing cards on the Sabbath, no dancing, though where would they have danced in rural Orangeburg County if given the chance? Juke joints were devil dens. Maybe there were barn dances, but I doubt it.

On the other hand, my daddy’s people were indifferent Methodists. In the 19th Century, they must have been devout because my great-great grandfather Wesley, a Confederate foot soldier and later prisoner of war, named his son Luther, and I’m one of four descendants named Wesley in honor of the founder of the Methodist Church.

However, by my grandfather’s generation, none of the Moores I know of attended church. We did pray, mumbled the same rote grace every meal, but otherwise, the only time God’s name was uttered in our house, it was taken in vain by my father in anger.

Other families I occasionally ate with might ad-lib their blessings, mentioning current events, family members, and on one occasion, me, which made me feel somewhat uneasy for whatever reason. Obviously, praying was meaningful to them, an attempt at communication with the Lord rather than the empty abracadabra lip service we recited at our dinner table.

For a year or two, when I was eight nine, my mother, my brothers, and I sporadically showed up at Summerville Baptist Church where my grandmother Hazel worshipped. Pathologically shy, I despised going because I felt out-of-place, like an intruder; plus the place smelled strange, chemically odd, like they overdid the disinfectant. I’d much rather been at home smelling stale cigarette smoke dreading Monday reading the funny papers.

My mother wasn’t enamored with Summerville Baptist, yet sought a spiritual haven, so she joined St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, willing to be tarred with the accusation of being a social climber. So here I was again intruding in a strange place of worship, this one with ritualistic recitations, head-bowing, and kneeling that were alien to me. But Mama was serious this go around. She signed me up for confirmation classes. 

I hated being two years older than the other confirmation students, yet once I started attending, I did learn the basics of Judeo-Christianity, that the Old Testament was a covenant between God and Moses, and the New Testament a covenant between God and us mediated by his only begotten son. We had to memorize the names of the books of the Torah and the names of the first six books of the New Testament. I scored a 100 on the exit exam, was confirmed, and became a member of St. Paul’s. 

Back then, we used the 1928 version of the Book of Common Prayer which employed Jacobean English, and because of my uncanny ability to retain verse, song lyrics, and in this case liturgy, in a few years I could recite “The Order of Morning Prayer” by memory.[1]  

Here’s my favorite ditty from the Rite of Holy Communion: “If any man sin we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous, and he is the Propitiation for our sins.”

Has a ring to it, doesn’t it.

Anyway, once I became an adult and married Judy Birdsong, who had been a Young Lifer in high school, lost her religion at Presbyterian College in Clinton, SC, “a small Christian College for small Christians,” as Judy used to say, I bid adieu to Christianity. 

We had our two sons baptized, but other than a short two-month stint at Sullivan’s Island’s Church of the Holy Cross when the boys were five and six, we didn’t go to church. However, they did attend Porter-Gaud, an Episcopal School, and sat in chapel every other week. 

My cousin Zilla, my great aunt Ruby’s daughter, an incredibly nosy and outspoken Baptist, once asked me if I had seen to my sons’ spiritual needs, and I could honestly say they frequently attended services at their school.

As I’ve written more than once, I envy people blessed with faith. It must be an enormous comfort, especially in the waning days of the American Empire.

O God, the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, our only Saviour, the Prince of Peace; Give us grace seriously to lay to heart the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions. Take away all hatred and prejudice, and whatsoever else may hinder us from godly union and concord.

Amen!

[1] This “uncanny ability” of memory doesn’t, alas, kick in with people’s names. 

Preface to Long Ago Last Summer

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Where to Begin

            How about with invasion: muskets versus bows and arrows? Wind-borne lamentations. Later, clinking chains, songs of woeful repetition. The worst kind of karma, evil spreading out in concentric circles, dispersing like an oil spill, sullying every man, woman, and child.

This degradation is Faulkner’s great theme: the darkness of terrible wrongs blighting the Southern landscape, passing from generation to generation, destroying both the rich and the poor, Joe Christmas and Quentin Compson.

            These shadows—genocide, slavery, the War—incubate the monsters of Southern Gothic literature: incestuous aristocrats, necrophiliac halfwits, sadistic Alabama sheriffs—not to mention the supernatural, hoodoo and haints. 

            When I was eleven or twelve, I asked our housekeeper Alice who was part Cherokee and part African if she believed in ghosts, and she told me that she had seen her father standing in her backyard the night after his death. We were sitting in my mother’s 1960 Ford Fairlane in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly in Summerville, South Carolina. I could see wonder and dread on Alice’s face when she told me about that visitation. She was tall, slender, graceful, light- skinned with high cheekbones, but always wore a somewhat sad expression. I have no idea how old she was.

            The dog was howling, she said. The dog had seen her papa’s ghost as well.

            The supernatural is one strain of Southern Gothicism; however, the suicide hanging in the attic, the alcoholic great aunt who gave birth to the idiot child buried in the backyard is another. These more mundane instances of Southern Gothicism are even more terrifying because they’re not merely figments of superstitious imaginations, but flesh-and-blood monstrosities. William Faulkner’s Miss Emily Grierson and Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit did not materialize out of thin air; their prototypes, walking and talking lost causes, traveled the streets of Oxford and Milledgeville.

***

            Over the course of her long life, Shirley Gibson, a Charleston institution, has amassed an enormous number of friends from every social strata, from countesses to street musicians. Also, she has mentored dozens of young people including the artist Shephard Fairy and the novelists Katie Crouch and Grady Hendrix. Having taught art at Porter-Gaud School for four decades, her house on Trumbo Street features an array of colorful ceramics she has crafted in an Italian style. A somber portrait of her great grandmother hangs in the downstairs parlor, but the house, despite its age, projects a youthful vibe. Associating with young people keeps you young, they say, and Shirley remains young at eighty-something.

            Some of Shirley’s people come from Mississippi, the birthplace of the blues and the former stomping grounds of William Faulkner himself, whose novels take place in the imaginary county of Yoknapatawpha, modeled on Lafayette County and its county seat Oxford, Faulkner’s hometown.  He spent the majority of his life populating Yoknapatawpha with characters who span the entire history of Mississippi, starting with native inhabitants of the early 19th Century, through the antebellum period, the War itself, and its awful aftermath — characters like Chief Issetibbeha, the planter Thomas Sutpen, Bayard Sartoris, Sam Fathers, Ike McCaslin, Joe Christmas, Benji Compson, Flem Snopes, Dilsey Gibson . . . 

            Mississippi is also where the novelist Walker Percy and his brothers LeRoy and Phinizy moved after they were orphaned in the 1930s.  Their adopted town Greenville calls itself “the heart and soul of the Delta,” and it was there that Walker Percy became lifelong friends with Shelby Foote, the novelist and chronicler of the Civil War. As young men, they embarked on a pilgrimage to Oxford to meet Faulkner. Although Foote and Faulkner engaged in a spirited conversation, Percy was so awestruck that he was unable to utter more than a couple of words.

Shelby Foote and Walker Percy

            A few years ago at one of Shirley Gibson’s dinner parties, I sat at the dining room table next to Walker Percy’s niece Melissa.  Although Melissa didn’t delve into her family’s “ancient history,” her great grandfather, John Walker Percy, committed suicide in 1917 when Uncle Walker was one, and Walker’s father, LeRoy Hope Percy, took his own life when Walker was thirteen. After her husband’s death, Walker’s mother, Martha Susan Phinizy, moved to Athens, Georgia, with her three sons to live with her mother.

            At the dinner table on Trumbo Street, Melissa told the story of her grandmother’s death, how she drove her car off a county bridge into a creek with Melissa’s father in the front seat. Her father Phin, only nine years old at the time (six years younger than his brother Walker), somehow managed to extricate himself from the sinking automobile, but his mother would or could not escape. Uncle Walker, she told us, regarded the death as a suicide. 

            After crawling his way up the bank, her father Phin waited on the side of a desolate Georgia dirt road in the middle of nowhere, his mother by now a corpse in the submerged car. He sat there alone for twenty minutes. Melissa said that the next car that came by was Uncle Walker’s. They, along with brother LeRoy, were now the orphans of suicides, fortunate to find a good home with their first cousin once removed, William Alexander Percy, a bachelor lawyer and a poet, but the orphans of suicides, nevertheless. At the time of this telling, her father was still alive—though not alive—in a nursing home, one of the living dead. In the Percys’ case, Southern Gothicism was not merely a literary genre, but a way of life.

            Long Ago Last Summer, a collection, short fiction, poetry, and essays, forms a sort of a mosaic of my life. It’s a guided tour, if you will, of the haunted houses and cobwebbed attics of my youth. You will encounter a collection of characters: village idiots, spinster aunts, hard core alcoholics, and at least one mass murderer, Pee Wee Gaskins, who picked me up hitchhiking in 1971. Each piece can stand alone, so you can skip around. However, if you read the chapters in chronological order, you will grow up and grow old with me, as it were. For example, the first two stories in the collection, “Those Who Think, Those Who Feel” and “Airwaves,” are highly fictionalized accounts of portions of my parents’ lives. The last entries deal with my wife Judy’s death and my finding new late life love. 

            Although coming of age in the South in the post-World-War-II era could be very unpleasant—not to mention dangerous—it wasn’t all bleakness and mayhem. We had more than our share of laughs, and despite the ignorance and bigotry and anger manifest throughout our history, including the present with the MAGA movement, I’m nevertheless proud to claim the South as my homeland.

            After all, if it weren’t for Blacks and Scotch Irish rustics, American culture would be dull indeed.

Transitioning from Tween to Teen in 1966

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The summer before my eighth grade year, I started hanging out with nerdy high school sophomores who, rather than drinking and fornicating, behaved like tweens, tweens who could drive at night but who also did dumb stuff like chunking lit cherry bombs out of windows of moving vehicles with fireworks galore on board. I didn’t lie to my mother – my father was a distant figure, not involved with my comings and goings – I’d tell Mama I’d be riding around town with Ricky and Dave, and she’d say okay but be home by ten. I can’t remember my precise curfew, probably ten. In high school it was 11:30.

I have no memory of what we talked about on those hours-long drives, but I do remember cherry bombs exploding underwater when we’d stop at a bridge, and I remember the circuit we’d take, heading out Trolley Road to Dorchester, taking a left, then another left that took us to Ladson, skirting a subdivision called Tranquil Acres where my crush, blandly pretty, super-intelligent Laura Alexander lived with her Air Force Lt. Colonel of a father, her mother, and whatever siblings she may have had. 

We’d head back along that stretch of Hwy 78 towards Twin Oaks, or sometimes take Lincolnville Road back to our subdivision. This looping drive introduced me to a strange, incongruous world of manufactured houses with meticulously tended gardens and churches, churches, churches, tiny concrete block churches, every half-mile on both sides of the road, with exotic names rife with schism, like the Second Church of God Consecrated in Holy Blood of the Nazarene.[1]

My high school friend Ricky was the product of what some called in those days “a broken home,” and he rarely saw his father, an airline pilot who showered him with gifts whenever they did get together. His mother worked, so we could hang out at his house and listen over and over and over again to The Animals Greatest Hits, which ended up being a revelation to me, hearing Eric Burdon sing “House of the Rising Sun” in a voice that sounded as if he himself could have been  born in Summerville, singing in baritone with a hint of Gullah about things much deeper than you found in the Monkees’ catchy love songs.

Ricky had two sisters, one off at college and another maybe a junior or senior, a year or two older. Her name was Penelope, and one afternoon, she jumped out of a closet in her institutional white bra and panties screaming “boo!” If this were a graphic novel instead of po-dunk memoir, I’d have my auburn hair porcupining like I’d received an electric shock. She howling, laughing, sprinted to her room, butt jiggling, and slammed the door. It was weird, but cool, yet it never happened again. She spent a lot of time in her room alone. She was a brunette, very good looking, but not all that popular.

The older sister, on the other hand, a coed at the University of South Carolina, had been a Summerville High School superstar, the homecoming queen, maybe.[2] I met her once with her boyfriend at Ricky’s, the boyfriend Hollywood good-looking and the son of the woman who four years later would be my English teacher, the model for Mrs. Barrineau in Today, Oh Boy. I knew about this star couple because my aunt Virginia, only 6 years older than I-and-I[3], was in their graduating class. I felt as if I were hanging with celebrities, and they shocked me by striding up to Ricky’s mama’s bar and pouring themselves some kind of whiskey over ice. Ricky showed my future teacher’s son of Best of the Animals‘ album cover, and he said that “House of the Rising Sun” was the only song he liked, and I thought to myself what about “We Got to Get Out of This Place,” what about “It’s My Life,” what about “Please Don’t Let Me Misunderstood?” 

It was a memorable summer. 

[1] Or something like that.

[2] None of my yearbooks have survived my bopping from place to place, so I can’t confirm. 

[3] This affectation, using the Rasta hyphenated pronouns, does come in handy here where I can avoid the conversational, grammatically incorrect “me” yet sound hip.

You can purchase Today, Oh Boy HERE.

Rambling, Riffling, Reminiscing

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Coole Park, County Galway, Ireland

This is the first day of autumn weather wise, the turning of yet another page in the annals of my accumulated seasons, dating all the way back to 1952 when I was born just two weeks shy of the winter solecist.

Autumn was my mother’s favorite season, my late wife Judy’s favorite season, and my beloved Caroline’s favorite season. However, I always associated autumn with the beginning of school, which for me was always a sad occasion.[1] Despite the scorching heat, the subcontinental humidity, I always hated for to summer end.

Back when I attended elementary school, male teachers were as rare as white non-segregationists.[2] Rummaging through the cob-webbed bric-a-brac filled attic of my ever-dimming memory, I’m trying to come up with my first male teacher’s name.

A line of white-haired ghosts files past – Miss Marion, Mrs. Wiggins, Mrs. Jordon, Mrs. Montz, Mrs. Stall, Miss McCue, Mrs. Altman. Nope, no males in elementary school; even the principal Mrs. Muckenfuss was female.

In junior high, we had male PE teachers and a male principal whom I once saw knock two students’ heads together Three Stooges style, an act that today would no doubt land him before a judge.

Ah, those were the days. It was from him I received my first paddling, three sharp thwacks upon the tiny target my thirteen-year-old butt. I had Coach Blanton for PE, one of my mother’s good friends from high school, but I can’t think of a junior high academic male teacher.

As it turns out, I can’t remember all my teachers’ names, in fact, only a handful. There was Miss Shirley, a seventh grade Spanish teacher. I think I remember Mrs. Euler taught science, Mrs. Morgan English, Mrs. Meyers Algebra, and Mrs. Waltrip seventh grade math. I can’t for the life of me remember who taught me history, my favorite subject back then. And, oh yeah, Reid Charpia was another male PE teacher I had.

Okay, let’s try high school. One of my homeroom teachers was male, but I didn’t have him in class.

Eureka! It’s finally come to me finally. Captain House was my first male teacher, a WWII navy veteran, a colorful character who led this cheer at pep rallies:

Give ’em the ax,

Give ’em the ax,

Give ’em the ax.

Which side?

Which side?

Which side?

The cutting side!

The cutting side!

The cutting side.

Indeed, Captain House was the inspiration for a cheer I tried to install in Porter-Gaud’s collection of cheers, one I adapted from Alston High School, the African American high school in the “separate-but-equal” days.

Whup ’em, Cyclones, whup ’em.

Whup ’em, Cyclones, whup ’em.

Whup ’em, Cyclones, whup ’em, Cyclones, whup ’em, Cyclones,

Whup ’em!

I reckoned the primitive guttural chant would be a more effective motivator than the sing-songy cheers Porter-Gaud employed.

Victory, Victory, is our cry:

V-I-C-T-O-R-Y.

Will we win it?

You doggone right.

Porter-Gaud, Porter-Gaud, fight, fight, fight!

The irony is that I-and-I, a hater of school, ended up a teacher, did 34 years, as the ex-cons say. But now that’s over, I can fully embrace the pleasures of autumn, the crisp air, the turning of the leaves, college football, the MLB playoffs, etc. as I shuffle off towards my eventual exit.

The Wild Swans at Coole

The trees are in their autumn beauty,

The woodland paths are dry,

Under the October twilight the water

Mirrors a still sky;

Upon the brimming water among the stones

Are nine-and-fifty swans.

*

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me

Since I first made my count;

I saw, before I had well finished,

All suddenly mount

And scatter wheeling in great broken rings

Upon their clamorous wings.

*

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

And now my heart is sore.

All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,

The first time on this shore,

The bell-beat of their wings above my head,

Trod with a lighter tread.

*

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold

Companionable streams or climb the air;

Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still.

*

But now they drift on the still water,

Mysterious, beautiful;

Among what rushes will they build,

By what lake’s edge or pool

Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day

To find they have flown away?

WB Yeats

[1] I did enjoy buying back-to-school supplies, book bags and spiral notebooks. I can almost still smell the army surplus backpacks that Mama bought. However, all too soon those notebooks would be filled with my chicken scratch scrawl and the backpack with cheese cracker crumbs.

[2] How’s that for a jarring transition?

Work Stoppage (Or the Wages of Sloth)

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from the Smithsonian Art Museum

In the summer of 1972, I went to work for Flack Jones Lumber because it was one of three establishments in Summerville that hired longhairs. To say I was an unskilled laborer would be an understatement. Driving a nail, much less running a power saw, transcended my meager talents, so I ended up bouncing around the lumberyard on a truck driven by a Black man who went by the name of Hambone.  We performed odd jobs like moving stacks of boards and shoveling sawdust. Hambone, who had crinkly cottony hair beneath his green hardhat, was a man of few words, but I do remember his making this pronouncement one blistering June afternoon: “When I was young, I couldn’t wait to knock off work so I could go fishin’. Now I can’t wait to knock off so I can get me a drink of liquor.”

Surprisingly, my White coworkers were cordial, given that the early Seventies were fraught with clashes between blue collar laborers and longhairs, especially in the Deep South. Once a fellow who looked Scots-Irish asked if I thought a man’s hair could grow as long as a woman’s.

My hair was red, so I stood out like a sore thumb WC Fields’ nose. 

“I reckon so,” I said.

I recall one particularly irksome task. Armed with a shovel blade, I crawled beneath a power saw and filled a plastic bucket with sawdust and then crawled out to dump the sawdust in a designated pile, and then crawled back under to repeat this labor until all the sawdust had been removed. Shortly thereafter, I decided Flack Jones wasn’t for me, though the hours were all right, Monday through Friday from 7 to 4.

I heard that Red and White, which also hired longhairs, had an opening, so I applied and was hired, joining my friends Joey Brown, David Kaczor, and Jim Collins bagging groceries, though actually Joey and David had worked their way up to stocking shelves. 

On my very first day, I got yelled at by the owner’s son for overloading a bag with canned goods, and twelve hours later, when tasked with mopping the floor, the owner’s son chided me for my poor technique and demonstrated how to move the mop head in circles. So, of course, I followed his lead, only to be confronted by the produce man John Henry who told me I was doing it all wrong and modeled for me an alternate technique. moving the mop in S-like patterns. As I’d move up and down the aisles mopping, I’d keep a look out for my two instructors and switch back and forth depending on who was passing my way, though I preferred John Henry’s method.

“Now, that’s more like it,” one or the other would say.

Working at Red and White was less grueling than working at Flack Jones, but the hours sucked – two twelve hour shifts on Fridays and Saturdays and every other Sunday with afternoon shifts on the other weekdays with Mondays and Wednesdays off.

So, I quit to take a pay cut to work at Carolina Home Furnishers, the third place that hired longhairs, where I mostly sat in a recliner and watched daytime TV with my boss Weeza, a benevolent overseer who called me “darling” and sent me to the liquor store around the corner in the afternoons.

It seems that she and Hambone were on the same page.

Yes, I was lazy that summer, not to mention vain, and unaccustomed to working, but my leisure days were over. At USC, I worked at Capstone cafeteria after classes on weekdays and on Saturday mornings and bused tables at the revolving restaurant Top of Carolina during Sunday Brunch. The pay was $1.15 an hour, but I got one free meal. After I graduated and entered grad school, I stopped working at the cafeteria to tend bar at the Golden Spur but continued to bus tables on Sundays until I dropped out to seek my fortune in the Lowcountry.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Dick, Jane, Sally, and Nicodemus: Memories of Summerville Elementary School

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Last week in the wee hours after my perpetual nemesis Ol’ Man Insomnia banged on the bedroom door of my slumbers and roused me yet again, I decided rather than counting sheep, I’d attempt to short circuit my tendency to fret about upcoming responsibilities by seeing how many names of former teachers I could recall.

My academic career began in the school year 1958-59 at Miss Marion’s kindergarten, a one-room schoolhouse in the backyard of her home somewhere near the railroad tracks in downtown Summerville. I don’t remember Miss Marion’s last name, and what I do remember about kindergarten tends to be negative – getting in trouble with John Lang for sailing girls’ tea set dishes like Frisbees, Bert Pearce’s falling off a swing into a mud puddle and having to sit in the bathroom in his underwear until his pants dried, breaking my Davy Crockett thermos by pouring Coca-Cola into it instead of milk, a student telling me that my mother chose a black instead of a bright yellow raincoat for me because she wanted me to be run over by a car. I also remember Miss Marion’s reading bible stories from a gigantic book propped on an easel and my falling in love with nursery rhymes, which would bode poorly for my future employment as I ended up as an English teacher and hack poet.

Yet, as happens so often in life, I didn’t realize how easy I had it at my cloistered middle-class kindergarten until I entered Summerville Elementary with its all white yet economically diverse population of older kids. I got lost before school on day two. Guided by my infallibly fallible sense of direction, I lined up on steps among unfamiliar faces. It was the second-grade entrance. Some kind soul, however, led me to my proper station, but the damage was done. School was a scary place.

Nevertheless, my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Wiggins, was nice and nurturing. If you think about it, first grade teachers provide you with more education than any other teacher of any grade. They teach you to read, to write, to add and to subtract.  Back then I was always losing my crayons and books instead of like now when it’s passports and beers that go missing. 

The child is the father of the man, as Wordsworth wrote.

My second-grade teacher Mrs. Jordan was older and gruffer than Mrs. Wiggins. Plump, white-haired, Mrs. Jordan read to us out loud. Some of the books featured an African American boy named Nicodemus. These books, written in dialect, were rife with stereotypes, and Mrs. Jordan sounded very much like an African American when she read them. Meanwhile, actual African American students sat in desks across town at Alston, the so-called separate but equal alternative to Summerville Elementary. I remember that Mrs. Jordan only gave white drawing paper to capable artists; the rest of us got lower grade stock upon which we’d create valentines.

The older I get in school, the less I remember, oddly enough (as the following shrinking paragraphs suggest). 

I had Mrs. Montz in third, Mrs. Stall in 4th, and Miss McCue in 5th, perhaps the first pre-menopausal teacher I encountered. Redheaded and perky, she made school interesting. Unlike most years, I didn’t dread going to school in the 5th grade. In fact, I was chosen to be a patrol boy and got to sport a white chest belt with a badge, if I remember correctly.

Mrs. Altman was my 6th grade teacher, and it was in the 6th grade when arithmetic had turned into the new math and my grades began to suffer. Before the 6th grade, I could pretty much get straight As by merely listening, but those days were over, and the horrors of puberty just around the corner, along with Spann Junior High where I would witness an administrator bang two boys’ heads together in the lunch line Three Stooges’ style, but I’ll save that memory until a later bout with insomnia.

A Not Fervent Hypocritical Plea

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Listen, when I was young, I was reckless. Just ask my dead mother who in a Biloxi, Mississippi beach cottage circa 1956 scraped me screaming off a hardwood floor after I had leapt Lone-Ranger-like from the top of my chest-of-drawers onto a rocking horse that catapulted me face first splat. 

Ask Joey Brown, whose Toyota I totaled in Hilton Head on a roundabout in August of 1976.

Or ask Jacob T. Williams II who two years later rode shotgun as I drove my MG Midget down a capital city sidewalk and made an ill-fated left down steps into a parking garage whose bottom floor housed the Campus Police of the University of South Carolina.[1]

Given that regrettable history, you might think I’d grant slack to others who foolishly throw caution to the salt breeze of Folly Beach, yet, this afternoon, as I walked home from Chico Feo on East Erie, my tongue cluck-clucked as I espied[2] a family of conservative-looking folks[3] barreling past in a golf cart with a grandmother teetering on the back seat clutching a squirming child no more than six months old. 

Yes, that’s foolish, I was foolish, but is it any of my business?

No, it’s not. They, though Darwinianly dense, weren’t endangering anyone but themselves (and their progeny), The odds were pretty good they’d get where they were going without a distracted texter, blind-as-a-bat octogenarian, or meth-crazed speed demon smashing into them.[4]

No, it’s none of my business.

On the other hand, reckless people who refuse to get vaccinated or wear masks indoors in close quarters are everyone’s business. Their refusal, whether prompted by political lobotomization, laziness, and/or unscientific paranoia, has allowed the virus to mutate.[5]. The needless continuance of contagion dampens sparks, snuffs out fun. Twice now, my 50th highschool reunion has been postponed – that and 1 out of 500 Americans has died of COVID according to the Washington Post.

So, c’mon people now, smile on your brother [and sister].

Everybody get together and get a vaccine right now.[6]

Right now.

Right how. 

Because if you roll the dice often enough, you gonna come up snake eyes. 

 

Here’s Rickie Lee doing “The Horses”

Rickie Lee Jones performs on Saturday Night Live in 1982, the year after she released her second album, Pirates.</e

[1] This little lark cost me a reckless driving conviction, 200 dollars, and six points off my license, not to mention a significant elevation of my insurance rates, but as Rickie Lee Jones so eloquently put it in her best song “The Horses,” “when I was young, I was a wild, wild one.”

[2] You know any writer who uses the verb “espied” has one foot in the ditch of dementia. 

[3] And I don’t mean by “conservative” MAGA-hat-wearing gun-toting cretins but regular-looking Jesus-believing white Southerners.

[4]  However, two blocks west of where I saw the golf cart stands a marker commemorating the spot where someone named Mark Riedel was killed by someone who ran a stop sign.

[5] The bad good news is that it seems that COVID has taken out a disproportionate number of rightwing radio personalities, which is okay with me.

[6] Of course, the odds of a vaccine holdout reading this blog are less than the University of South Carolina Gamecocks going undefeated this season. 

Confessions of an Indoorsman

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drafty garret claustrophobia

Back in the early 50s when I first became aware of sensations, diesel fuel was a predominant smell, and I grew to savor it. My grandfather owned a service station, and early in my life for a year or so our family lived there in a commercial building that doubled as a domicile. We called this abode “The Station.” Out front it was all concrete, though there was a grassless backyard with one lone sycamore tree standing on the edge of the property. 

A Doberman pincher named Ace roamed the desert domain of the backyard, and he was about as friendly as Cerberus, the three-headed canine guardian of the Greek Underworld. So I spent my days inside safe from traffic and attack dog, a preschooler cut off from nature. There wasn’t that much nature to see at the Station anyway. The only wildlife I remember encountering were a black snake sunning on summer pavement and bats zigzagging overhead at dusk.

At night, eighteen wheelers rushed past in swooshes, sounding somewhat like waves breaking on a beach. In fact, the Station was sort of like a barren island standing in a sea of cement. We lived in isolation.

The Station in the 50s

What a contrast to the town of Summerville itself, “Flowertown in the Pines,” a garden of earthly delights where the sweet ephemeral smell of tea olive wafted in front and back yards among the other flowering shrubs, azaleas and gardenias.

We had moved from the Station to Laurel Street across from the Playground with its swings, sliding boards, a foot-propelled merry-go-ground, and a bell-shaped contraption we called the “ocean wave.” Unfortunately, I contracted rheumatic fever at Laurel Street and spent three months confined to bed after a weeklong stay in Dorchester County Hospital. Like Ace the Doberman and highway traffic, disease also kept me inside before I started kindergarten.

Did these early experiences of mandatory house arrest contribute to my becoming “an indoorsman?”[1]

Dunno. Maybe? Whatever the case, a prefer the not-so-great indoors. I’d much rather hunker down in a dark basement bar in Asheville than hike the Appalachian Trail.

ocean wave

Now, however, I live on the Folly River, and the windows that line the outer walls of our house look out over the marsh to uninhabited Long and Morris Islands. Now I can’t avoid nature; it’s been thrust upon me, even in our air-conditioned living room. Sitting on the sofa or out on the screened porch or deck, I have witnessed owls, wood storks, ospreys, painted buntings, egrets, bats, deer, bald eagles, river otters, and minks, not to mention the frogs that inhabit our water garden and fill the night with constant croaking. Also, I’ve seen my share of Wild Kingdom carnage, hawks swooping down to snatch birds, ospreys lumbering over the house with fish in their talons.

I still spend an inordinate time cooped up in my study, which I have dubbed “the drafty garret.” Cut off from the outside word, I spend way too much time staring into an iMac screen reading depressing news stories and fiddling around with words.

However, I still savor the evocative odor of diesel and the memory-producing aroma of tea olive and the flora and fauna of the backside of the Edge of America.  In other words, I enjoy being, whether indoors or out, thanks in great part to my wife Caroline and her daughter Brooks. Oh yeah, and KitKat, whom I’ve grown very fond of, a chihuahua terrier mix that wouldn’t have been my first pick of dog crossifications. Unlike Ace, her bark is worse than her bite.

Anyway, It’s summertime, and at least for now, as the song says, “the living is easy.”

[1] I was, on the other hand, an avid surfer until my mid-60s when old age made me feel as if I’d been in a minor auto accident after each surf session.