A Life in Shreds and Patches: Greatness Almost Thrust Upon Me, Conclusion

The inability to say no, when it needs to be said, has always been for me a major weakness.  I once foolishly took a job as managing editor of a magazine in the Midwest.  I promised my wife two or three years and we’d be back in South Carolina—five years at most.  Forty years of dealing with self-described conservatives, capitalists, and libertarians have sharpened my appreciation for Housman’s cheerful lines:

The bells justle in the tower

The hollow night amid;

And on my tongue the taste is sour

Of all I ever did.

We all make mistakes, and (to paraphrase Patrick Henry)  if running a conservative magazine was a mistake, I did my best to make the most of it.  Look at it this way: Life may not be fair, but every fool gets his  just deserts.

Usually, the results of foolish acquiescence  are short-lived except as anecdotes.  I dined out on this one for several days:   

Once, about 1970, I was walking from the campus in Chapel Hill to my apartment in Carrboro, then a down-market town dominated by working class whites and blacks.  It was a longish walk, but someone had stolen my bicycle.  I mentioned the theft to Douglas Young, my dissertation professor, reflecting that   “He who stole my bicycle robbed me of my health.”  He was on his way to catch a plane back to Scotland, and a few days later I received a postcard with my sentence turned into a lovely elegiac couplet in Greek.

There was a point where Franklin Street in Chapel Hill spilled into a curve into Carrboro.  In those days there was a large fruit and vegetable market, frequented by townies, especially black people in Carrboro.   I was walking past the market when a middle-aged colored man—he was hardly black—stepped out of the market and called to me.  Being a polite young fellow, I naturally stopped.  

“You like music, man?”

I said I did.

“What about blues?”

I cheerfully assented to liking  blues and dropped a few names—Bill Broonzy, Bobby Bland, John Hurt--as evidence.

“You like the harp—the harmonica?”

“I not only like the harp, but I can play it.”

Before long we were discussing the merits of Sonny Terry, whom I mistakenly believed to have been born in Durham.  My new friend corrected my error and started telling me about his friend Willie McCoy.  The name rang a bell.  At first I thought he was talking about Charlie McCoy, but he was a white country musician.  I dimly remembered a Willie McCoy, a Texas blues harp player who recorded “Mama Blues” before I was born.  

“No, this Willie’s my friend.  He’ll teach you things on the harp blow your mind.”

Since I've always been eager to improve any skill that did not require physical exertion, I stayed to talk. As the conversation moved along, my friend asked if I was thirsty, and we went inside the market, where I bought cokes and an unlabeled pint bottle of an unnamed colorless fluid.  The sight of the bottle attracted several of my friend’s acquaintances, including a short young woman, not unattractive, named Loretta.  

As the conversation progressed through several more pints, I found that I was hosting a party for my new circle of friends.  Coming halfway to my senses, I agreed to the party but reminded them I had to run a few errands for food and suitable beverages, if it was going to be a good party,  but I would return in an hour or so  The whole time, Loretta had hold of my arm, declaring passionately, “I’m goin wichyou.”  I forget what implausible excuse I dreamed up for having to run my errands alone, and we good friends dispersed, having met like the proverbial ships in the night.  To this day, I do not know if there was a real Willie McCoy who may still be waiting at the market to give me lessons on the blues harp.  

In looking back, I cannot help thinking of Alfred Budd, the hero of Kenneth Patchen’s Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer.  Every time someone stopped him on the street with a “Hey, Bud,” he assumed it was someone he had met before.  Assuming the best in people made him, to say the least, vulnerable.  I had read a lot of Patchen during what I sometimes think of as my “Beat” phase, when I used to hang out with a very hip artist from the Bay Area, and a circle of down-and-out hipsters in Charleston.  As I shall recount elsewhere, one of the hipsters was described to me as the "legendary jazz drummer Ronnie Free. "   

Neither Ronnie Free nor Sam Cooke was, in fact, my first brush with celebrity.  My father, who had always taught me to be suspicious of “show people,” had no reluctance to spend time with them.  We always watched the television show, The Naked City, and he once commented that he had known the mother of one of the stars, Paul Burke’s, whom he described as a fine-looking woman.  Santa Maria Burke and her husband Marty ran a nightclub he had frequented in New Orleans.  From the internet, I learn that the father Marty Burke was a boxer who lost to Gene Tunney twice. 

The only show people in Superior, Wisconsin, were performers at the annual Tristate Fair, and I recall my mother becoming noisily resentful when my father came home late after an evening’s binge with some of the performers.  It was the only time I ever heard them quarrel.  The only performer I heard mentioned that night was Russell Arms.  You have to be really old to remember, Your Hit Parade, a weekly pop music program starring Snookie Lanson, Giselle McKenzie, Dorothy Collins—and Russell Arms.  They'd count down (actually up) the week's top ten hits with song and dance numbers that bordered on the ridiculous, though most of them were as competent singers as  the celebrities with the hits.

On another occasion, when I was too sick to attend the fair, he brought home an autograph from “Hoppy and Lucky.”  He had apparently been celebrating with William Boyd, who only drank milk in the movies, because his career had almost been ruined when another actor of the same name was arresting for illegal gambling and consumption of alcohol.  Some years back, I bought a complete set of Hopalong Cassidy films and showed them to my granddaughter, who sagely observed, "Hoppy never disappoints."    One of my favorite scenes put Boyd in the dilemma of what to do when the fine Spanish gentleman, a Mexican official, offered him a glass of wine.   Taking the wine and sipping, Hoppy explained that while he did not drink, he would not offend the hospitality being offered.

One afternoon the old man showed up with a large powerful man in a condition my father and his friends would have described as “stiff.”  Drunk as he was, he was possessed of a quiet and controlled dignity that mightily impressed me who was used to seeing heavy drinkers on the streets of Superior.  When my father made introductions, it turned out I was meeting my favorite cowboy hero, Johnny Mack Brown, who first came to the attention of Hollywood when as fullback for the Crimson Tide he played in the Rose Bowl, where he was honored as MVP.  I was playing solitaire, and Johnny asked if I could play poker.  At the age of ten or eleven, I had already played a fair amount of poker, inevitably losing in a few hands the stake my father gave me.  He could win on any hand.  In losing to a great card player, I had learned a thing or two about the game, and I skinned poor Johnny alive, though he laughed amiably at every hand he lost.  Stiff as he was, he was a man to be admired.

All the boys in my neighborhood had cowboy heroes.  Most of us were loyal to Roy Rodgers, though there were a few, like the McQueen brothers, who held out for Gene Autry.  When we appealed to their father to decide, he answered sagely that while Roy might have made better movies, Gene was the better singer.  He certainly was, though his best films were vastly better than the best of Roy Rodgers’.  To this day, about once a decade, I watch the serial, Gene Autry and the Phantom Riders, a cross between a classic Autry Oater and Flash Gordon.  In addition to Roy and Gene, of course, there was Hopalong Cassidy, Lash Larue, Red Ryder, and Rocky Lane, all of whom had comic books, but my favorite was Johnny Mack Brown.  We all admired John Wayne, but I remember thinking how sad it must be play the part of a hero like Scaramouche but in real life, Stuart Granger, like John Wayne, was only an actor.  That was the point, I am convinced, when I began to detach myself from Hollywood.

Since I had imbibed my father’s skeptical view of show people, I bore lightly the failure to meet Sam Cooke. And, you will understand that I was less than enthusiastic, when a year or two after the doomed triple date, the girl I was going with—let’s call her Belle—told me that her friend Angie Smith had a date with Jerry Lee Lewis, who was going to do a show at the Folly Beach ocean pier.  How Angie had got hooked up with Jerry Lee, I never could figure out, but she was a stewardess, and every college boy back then believed he knew all about stewardesses.  

Perhaps for her own protection, Angie had invited us to go along.  She was a cute girl, as we would have said in those day—Paski would definitely have described her as “pneumatic.”  She knew Jerry Lee was still married to his third wife, the Child Bride, his cousin Myra Gale Brown.  Myra was thirteen, when the couple tied the knot, but by this time she had reached the advanced age of twenty.  Everyone in the world, including Angie who did not read newspapers, knew about the marriage, but she shared my inability—or should I say unwillingness?—to foresee consequences.  

In fact, Angie could never see much beyond her cute little button nose, which is maybe why she ended up being treated for depression on the tenth floor—the loony ward—of the Medical College Hospital, though the shrinks would have explained everything away by the term “bi-polar,” as if sticking an invented technical term on someone could solve an actual problem.  If you want my opinion (or even if you don’t), my experience has been people as crazy as Angie are high on their craziness.  It’s like runners who are addicted to adrenalin and endorphins, and even though they are destroying their body, they cannot quit running.  

I should have known something was wrong with Angie.  She was a more determined drama queen than my sister, and she smoked over a pack of Salems a day and drank at least a six pack of Pepsi Cola.  She stayed slim by finishing every meal in the bathroom, sticking her finger down her throat.  It was Belle who revealed that to me.  She was always either “high on life” or in the depths of misery over some man she talked herself into falling for, and as her confidant, I had to listen to hours of romantic nonsense about Joe, who, sipping a Martini at the bar in Henry’s, could do a letter perfect Bogart imitation.  Angie probably believed he was Bogart or, even better, Richard Blaine or, better yet, Steve Morgan.

"You don't have to act with me, Steve. You don't have to say anything and you don't have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe     just whistle.  You do know how to whistle, don’t you Steve?  You just put your lips together and blow.”

If I had played the piano better, I might have replaced Hoagy Carmichael as Cricket.

Angie lived in a world of her own creation, or rather she starred in a film that she was writing and directing as they go along.  The professionals Nabokov described as witch doctors give magical names to such condition, but I have found that most men, not excluding the writer of this memoir, are attracted to women of the manic-depressive type.  Life with them is a roller coaster ride, a thrill a minute.  Even when they are in the dumps, they arouse our sympathy.  They are emotional pushers.  It’s not enough that they are addicted to the thrills: They cannot be thoroughly happy with their mood swings unless they can share them.  

Not surprisingly, then, I liked Angie, and I was her straight male confidante.  One night, when we were having drinks in Henry’s, waiting for Belle to arrive, she offered to me some of her methods. It was, naturally, for my own good.  She asked me to light her cigarette and, pretending to steady my lighter, lightly brushed the back of my hand for letting her hand fall to graze—ever so slightly-the inside of my thigh.  Every man should be so lucky as to learn the secrets from a master, or rather mistress, of the art.

We were friends, but I did not trust her: She was unpredictable and did not suffer contradiction or even an implied correction.  I did not dare even to hint that I wanted to know what she had done to get a date with Jerry Lee.  I did not want to find out what she would do.

Once at a party, after we had not seen each for a few months because she had been living in New York, Angie came up to me, wearing a low cut cocktail dress.  After the kiss on the cheek, she pretended to be interested in what I had been doing.  You can take my word for it: Girls like Angie are interested only in the person they see in the mirror fifty times a day.  She was drinking a very tall gin and tonic.  After a few polite, “So-how-have-you-been” remarks, she shifted gears and started boasting about her smart Jewish boyfriend in New York, her really smart Jewish friends in New York, and on and on, comparing them with me, whom she described as a pretentious but not very smart small-town Jew.  Of course, she knew I was not Jewish, but she was in one of those moods. Even though I knew better, I pointed out the obvious:

“Angie, you know I’m not Jewish.  What kind of a game are you playing?”

That was a mistake.  No one likes to be accused of playing games, and pretty girls are used to being flattered, not challenged.  Never dropping the alluring smile she kept on her face when she talked to men, she flung the entire G&T into my face.  I was happy it was not a Bloody Mary, but I had to respond somehow, so I reached out my left hand and with my forefinger I hooked the bottom of the V in her neckline, pulled the dress out, and poured my double scotch, ice and all, into the gap.  It was a waste of a not very good scotch.  I raised my left hand to block the predictable slap in the face, when, equally predictable, she went for my eyes with her long blood red fingernails.  It was the first and only time in my life when I was thankful to be wearing glasses.

You can understand, then, why, after the failure to connect with Sam Cooke, I was less than enthusiastic about a double date, especially one that included crazy Angie and the man who was already calling himself “The Killer.”  Still, I did want to see Jerry Lee, whom  I had admired since 1957, when at the age of twelve I first heard “Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On.”  Belle, whose taste in music ran to opera and Broadway shows, was not wild about going to hear Jerry Lee, so I agreed to meet her and Angie at the end of the set.  

In those days I didn’t drive and still don’t like to.  After three boiler-makers at the Keg, I went to Folly Beach with my friend Alec, with whom I had gone to see Stan Kenton at the Rifle Club.  Alec did not care much for rock and roll or even country: He was a musician and played strictly jazz and classical, but he did like to hear good musicians play, no matter what the music.  We once went to a James Brown show at County Hall on upper King Street.  When the band finished their warm-up, he wanted to leave.  

“I’ve heard what I came to hear.”

Alec had high standards.  We attended a performance of an early Beethoven symphony by the Charleston Symphony.  There was a phrase repeated by a French horn at several points in a movement, and the horn player flubbed it every time. The first time it happened, Alec looked at me, but from then on our nervous giggles turned to laughter which turned the audience against us.  “If you don’t like music, go home.”  That was the trouble:  We loved music.

By the time we got out to the beach, Jerry Lee had already started.  The crowd was thin, maybe two dozen kids standing on the uncrowded dance floor.  Jerry Lee, who had obviously been drinking all day, was not happy.  In fact, he looked downright ornery.  He was singing mostly country songs, glaring periodically at members of the band.  Jerry Lee had this famous habit of kicking the piano bench to one side.  On this occasion he had a smaller stool, and by now he had refined his technique to the point that he could, without looking or showing any sign, kick it straight at the drummer’s head.  The drummer, I don’t have to tell you, looked like one of those shell-shock cases we have all seen in war movies.

The band was tight, and Jerry Lee was in good voice.  He played “Great Balls of Fire” with more panache than I had seen on American Bandstand, although, admittedly, he did not pour gasoline and set the piano on fire, as he had done on the Big Beat Tour, when Alan Freed had refused to let him go on last.  As he walked off he said to Chuck Berry, “Top that, Ni-gger!”  As Jerry Lee must have known all too well, Chuck Berry had a notoriously mean temper.  Anyone but an East Louisiana redneck would have ended up bleeding his life away in the emergency.  Still, even without the gasoline, it was a great show, and the crowd was eating it up.

When Jerry Lee went back to his country repertoire, the enthusiasm seeped out of the audience like water leaking from a rusted out car radiator, and the crowd became increasingly restive.  Some young men, who had already drunk too much, were calling out the names of Jerry Lee’s major hits, which is exactly what you do not do, when you are dealing with any musician.  Once at a Velvet Underground set at the Matrix in San Francisco, some jerk kept on calling out, “Play “Heroin,” Lou, and made it worse by shouting out an apology.  Lou Reed looked out contemptuously at the apologetic heckler—the Matrix is a very small club, where a performer could see everyone—and remarked, “You don’t have to apologize…now, if you would like my socks…”

Lou Reed, for all his bad reputation, was a middle-class  Jewish boy from Long Island, while Jerry Lee was a wild redneck in a bad mood.  With a sinister smile, the has-been rock star paused to talk about Nashville, praising the great song writers and musicians who had made the city the music capital of America.  If the audience did not like country music, that was just too damn bad for them.  In the course of his narrative, he singled out the then unknown (to me at least) Charley Rich and proceeded to give a masterful performance of “Lonely Weekends,” a song, though I had never heard it, which Charley Rich had recorded a few years earlier in 1960.  

Well, I'll make it all right (well, I'll make it all right)

From Monday morning 'til Friday night,

Oh, those lonely weekends.

Since you left me (since you left me)

I'm as lonely as I can be

Oh, those lonely weekends.

Agreed.  The lyrics are not exactly Tom Moore or even Lorenz Hart, but you are not nineteen years old, half-drunk on whiskey, listening to Jerry Lee Lewis on Folly Beach.  As everybody knows, if only because I have said it repeatedly, you could drink anything just about anywhere in the Charleston area, no matter how young you were, if you knew how to behave.

Jerry Lee finished up, and Alec wanted to go back to Charleston, but I wanted just one more drink.  (How often have I used that line?)  Besides, I did not trust Angie not to pull something and leave me in the lurch on Folly, or should I rather say “in folly”?  Sure enough, she showed up without Belle, and explained that at intermission she had been visiting Jerry Lee in his dressing room, when Child Bride charged into the room breathing fire, and Sam, to escape the barrage of colorful abuse, had retreated.  She found Belle and told her the story, and, as I found out later, promised to take care of me.  Belle caught a ride home with friend, but Sam, because she was a good kind considerate human being who would never desert a friend, had hung around to give me the news.  Why hadn’t she told me earlier?  Well, she had met this guy she used to go out with, and…..

Alec drove me back to the dorm, though I made him stop at Big John’s on the way.  (When I give you my narrative about the Charleston bar scene in the 1960s, I’ll tell you about the legendary Big John Cannady)  When I wasn’t paying attention, he slipped out while I sipped a glass of Bud.  Alec was the studious type, a chemistry major who disliked crowds and noise.  Majoring in Greek, I was more interested in the pleasures celebrated by Anacreon, though the whole time I was barhopping I recalled the Greek text open on my desk with the light shining on it in eternal reproach. Alec’s departure was no problem.  From Bay Street to George and St. Philips was only a 15-20 minute walk on a beautiful night.  

On the way from Folly Beach, Alec had asked me if I was disappointed.  In those days, though I had as many and probably more anxieties than the average young man, I took life as it came.  I have always brooded over little things and can never sleep the night before catching a plane, but once, when I was arrested, I fell asleep before my friends showed up with the bail money.  Perhaps I had sung that poem of Yeats (Set to an old Irish tune by Herbert Hughes in 1909) once too often:  “She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs, but I was young and foolish and now am full of tears.”

“Disappointed?  No. I had not even gone to Sam Cooke’s show, though I had heard him since once before, but this time I did get to hear Jerry Lee, and it was some performance.  I was beginning to lose my snobbish disdain for country music, and I was happy to hear about Charley Rich.  Perhaps the best part was that I had not had to face the wrath of Child Bride.  Imagine if she had found the four of us in some joint like Bowen’s Island, eating oysters and drinking Becks?  What that woman could have done with an oyster knife!  And I could finish the evening in John’s or maybe stop off at the Cove.  Who knows whom I might run into or what might happen, not that I wanted anything to happen.  I never actually wanted anything to happen.  Sometimes, when things happen, the thing in question is disastrous—you get mugged, arrested, beaten up, humiliated.  You just never know so long as you don’t know how to say “No.”