Mrs. Maisel In Smith Park

 In season four of the Marvelous Mrs Maisel, Midge decides that since she's never seen Susie mention a man in her life or a man that she likes, then she must be a lesbian, so she makes a trip to a park on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village where she asks every man she sees wearing a carnation in his lapel if he knows of an establishment where a lady might meet another lady.

This episode touches on so much that's a genuine part of American history in the sixties, even here in Mississippi.  In 1969, six years ahead in the show's storyline, homosexuals in New York rioted to protest police raids on the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, a known homosexual gathering place.  They rioted because, in 1969, police could arrest men for soliciting sex from other men, even if it wasn't prostitution.  They could be arrested for being gay.  

Midge is rebuffed by every gentleman she meets because they all think she's trying to entrap them and might be a cop until she meets an elegant, silver-haired creature with a pencil-thin mustache named Lazarus with a yellow carnation in the lapel of his tan linen suit.  Lazarus is played by seventy-four-year-old director John Waters.  If you're aware of Waters' body of work, this is a remarkably understated role for him, as he gently provides Midge with the location of lesbian bars in the area.

In 1963, in Jackson, Mississippi, it was also illegal for men to solicit sex from other men.  There was an incident at the old City Auditorium, where Capitol Towers is now,  where a sting operation was set up to catch the men who had taken up meeting in the lower level men's washroom.  Several businessmen, church leaders, teachers at Central High School, and Professors at Millsaps and other institutions were arrested.  Their arrests appeared in the paper but were buried in the back because one of the men arrested worked for the paper.  

After the raid, men stopped using the Auditorium as a meeting place, and the city managers made sure the lavatories were locked up when there wasn't a performance.  In a few years, they would begin construction on the new city auditorium, which we now call Thalia Mara Hall.  Before openly gay bars began appearing in the 1980s, a new location where gentlemen could meet other gentlemen opened up, and they began using Smith Park at night.   After the Stonewall riots in New York, the new Jackson Police chief sent out unofficial word that unless these men were openly soliciting for prostitution or having sex in public places, his officers had to leave them alone.  An uncomfortable state of stale detente existed between the police and the gay community, and they were allowed to exist in this lovely small park between the Governor's Mansion and Galloway United Methodist Church.

That's where I come in.  I was a member of Galloway United Methodist Church in the seventies.  Although I was not very active in the Galloway Youth Ministry, my sister was, and as there were three years when I could drive, but she could not, I was often tasked with picking her up after youth activities or rehearsals in the Galloway Drama Ministry, which meant parking beside the church, across from Smith Park at night while gentlemen glid back and forth in the shadows of the parks ancient live oaks, discussing each other.  Smith Park was also where I would meet a gentleman who worked for the Hinds County Sheriff's Department and sold me anabolic steroids.  Sports drugs weren't considered a very serious crime at the time.  It might not have even been a crime when we began, but it was always shady and always a bad idea.  As a teenager, I specialized in bad ideas.

I knew what was going on in the park.  I know what these men were and what they were doing but it never filled me with shock and revulsion like it did a lot of people.  My main interests as a teenager were weight-lifting, performing arts, (especially special makeup and special effects), graphic arts, and dimensional arts; I was comfortable with homosexuals because they abounded in the fields I was interested in.  Having met them, I new they were no threat to me.  

Even before I could drive, I was starting to have my parents drop me off at the Downtown YMCA, where I could spend the entire day lifting weights, getting steam, and swimming.  At my mother's insistence, my father sat me down for a talk about the men who also spent the entire day at the YMCA.  I assured him that I already understood this and I was aware of them, and so far, none had approached me, which they hadn't.  I don't know if it's because I was underage or if maybe I just wasn't very attractive, but I was never approached by another man in all my years in the gym.  They existed, and I existed.  Sometimes we were friends, and sometimes they ignored me.  It simply wasn't an issue or a consideration.  

At Galloway, I would sit in my Ford LTD in the dark with a sketchbook or a novel, waiting for my sister to finish her practice in the Mikado or Carnival while gentlemen took a chance on romance in the dark across the street.  Every so often, somebody would say "hey" in the dark, and I would wave back at their shadow without really halting my reading or drawing.  They never approached.  

Almost never approached.

"Hey, I'm Ryan."

Ryan was remarkably small.  Neatly dressed in polished shoes.  If he was older than me, it wasn't by much.  I wore old jeans, a ripped sweatshirt, and leather gloves with the fingers cut off so I didn't get callouses gripping dumbells.  I thought they looked cool in Rocky, and they became my trademark for a while.  

"You like to draw."  He said.  "Can I see?"

I showed him the sketches in my book.  Mostly figure studies, some taken from the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, others taken from Muscle and Fitness magazine, and some skeletons from a book in the library.  There weren't actual figure study classes for sixteen-year-olds in Jackson at the time.  There weren't really drawing classes at all.  I had to teach myself.  My brother was teaching me for a while, but he lost his way, and I was on my own.  I never quite forgave him for abandoning me while he was alive.  

It never occurred to me to say, "I'm straight, fuck off." or do anything rude to Ryan.  He was being bold, but he was also pretty scared.  I could be a cop.  I could also be a guy who picks up young gay guys and then takes them somewhere for my friends to beat the crap out of them or even kill them.  These things happened, and he was risking them by talking to a stranger in a car that looked exactly like a cop car but without the decals or the lights.  

To me, he seemed a gentle frightened creature, almost like a fawn stepping out of the woods to see my sketchbook and sniff my hand.   I was aware that he wanted something from me that I couldn't provide, but I was also aware that I could ruin his night and make him feel really bad about himself with a word.  I had friends, peers...acquaintances, I guess, who excelled at destroying people's sense of self with their words.   I'd already exhibited an ability to do the same.  I could move four times Ryan's weight in iron plates, but my real weapon was the words that came out of my mouth, but I withheld them. 

"Do you come here much?"  Ryan asked.

"I come here a lot.  I go to church here."  I said, motioning to Galloway's massive edifice with my thumb.   "I have a girlfriend.  Her name is Monica."  That was actually true.  I had an official girlfriend, who was a source of many and unexpected adventures.  She also provided me with a way to say to this skittish creature who was ready to disappear into the night like a frightened bird at the first sign of violence that I wasn't gay, even though I appeared friendly.  

Ryan smiled.  "I'm gonna go talk to my friends.  Thanks for showing me your drawings." And he slowly drifted back into the dark among the ancient trees and the ancient buildings, not fleeing danger like he could have, but returning to the world he knew, not as interested in the world I knew as he thought he might be.  

By the time I got to college, there were established gay bars in Jackson.  The most popular, just a block or two from Smith Park, and meeting in the park became more of an event for the city's growing homeless population than the city's gay population.  

I knew men who had their lives ruined by the raid on the City auditorium.  I'm not going to write about them like some people, but I knew them.  I knew Millsaps professors who had their livelihoods threatened by the event, but neither my father nor Dr. Finger, nor Dr. Graves had any desire to press the issue with anyone with tenure or on the tenure track, although there were professors at other institutions who did lose their job over it.   I was born into an era where it was very illegal to be gay and matured into an era where going to Jack and Jill's was the hip thing to do at Millsaps.  You'd be surprised how many eligible young women required a gentleman like myself to escort them there, partly to prove a willingness to bend to their will but also because it was the best place to dance, and they didn't want to wander around downtown at night without an escort.  

I never saw Ryan again.   I thought about him sometimes.  To be small and shy and gay in Mississippi in the eighties wasn't an impossible task but not an easy one either.  I imagined him to be a sort of Dill Harris from To Kill A Mockingbird but in color.  Would he grow up to be the Trueman Capote I saw on television?  I'll never know.  

There are people who wish nothing more than for homosexuals to return to the hidden world they used to inhabit.  They could survive there.  They did before.  It would make me sad, though.  Finding a companion can be a remarkably difficult thing under the best of circumstances.  Forcing men to do it in the dark, under the threat of losing their job or getting beaten to death, is cruel.  I don't want to live in a society where we have to be cruel to cover up a vulnerability I'm not even sure exists in the first place.

In a way, the gentlemen on Christopher Street in 1963 had an advantage over me.  All they had to do to find someone who was lonely and looking for a companion was go to the park and look for someone with a carnation in his lapel.  I suppose that's what Tinder is for, but meeting people in the park is ever so much more gentile than smudging filtered photos right or left with my pudgy thumb on my phone.  At least in the park, I'd have to smile and nod and acknowledge their existence before I swiped them out of my universe.   I'd rather live in a universe where people can meet and congregate civilly without fear of death or suffering.  They don't want anything different from what I want.  They just want it in a different way.

Dark Clouds Sunday Night

We tell ourselves that we're significant and important, but the clouds roll over us without noticing any of this.  Sometimes they send down fingers of God that destroy our homes and our fields, but they mean no offense; they're settling some argument among themselves and just don't notice the industry of the less-than ants below them.  

Dozens dead in the delta.  Homes and crops destroyed, lives ended, and the gaseous giants roll on over us without a word.  They can't see us.  They can't conceive of us.  They can sure kill us, though.  At any moment, they can send down a spinning finger of death and take everything, then return to the sky unaffected.  

Our place in the universe is a lie we tell ourselves because we need to feel important.  How many thousands of years did it take before we could even touch the clouds, and now, now that we can touch them, now that we can use our satellites to track their every move, we still can't do anything, not even a tiny bit to control them.  They give us life-providing water or not.  They send down tornados or hurricanes or lightning storms that kill us and destroy what we make or not.  Either way, we have no impact on what they do.  

We push many tons of carbon into the atmosphere so we're not inconvenienced in travel, carbon that would kill us straight away but only seems to make the clouds more active in their normal activities.  More floods, more droughts, more tornados, more hurricanes, and in return, we get bigger cars.  Doesn't seem like a very effective trade on our part.

The clouds pass over me.  Blotting out the sun.  Sending bolts of unimaginable electrical power between them, occasionally down to earth to destroy some massive tree on earth with me.  It's hardly the first time something incredibly powerful didn't acknowledge my existence.  I acknowledge theirs, though.  I paint them, I draw them, I write about them, and I make colorful lights to imitate their effect on the land.  I am in awe of their vast power and capricious nature, so much greater than anything we ants have ever created.  

I was going to be light and joyous and carefree this weekend, but my gaseous overlords chose to put on a display that soured my mood, storms then sunlight that blistered my ears but not my crown, then storms again to make me think twice about driving to town for church.  

Bottled water they need.  Everything in the past few years seems to depend on bottled water.  A few million pounds of plastic that won't bio-degrade should help things.  It doesn't matter to the clouds; they'll just roll over mountains of plastic like they roll over us.  Nothing we do impresses them.  I hear them speak now.  Words like I heard my father say in my crib before I knew what words mean.  They're not talking to me, I know.  Talking to each other, I suppose, I wonder what they're saying.  We call them non-sentient with the vain idea that only creatures like us have thought.  I doubt that's true.  All things have thought.  Thought creates reality and the reality is that I'll write about the clouds, but the clouds will never write about me.

Doubt and Success

I love writing about feelings.  I hate having them.  Fear, doubt, guilt, pain, more guilt, I can wax large about these all day, when I have them though--when I have them, it's like a swollen boil somewhere uncomfortable and impractical and waiting to burst, but stubbornly not, frozen at that point of not bursting and relieving the stress for what seems like the foreseeable future.  

I can plan my way out of any conflict, but then time becomes a factor.  Each step has a yes-no transition that leads to the next step or to another alternative step, and I feel like giving up before every decision, but I don't because the only way to relieve the pressure is to move on.  Failure, pain, suffering, and embarrassment are always an option but not a preference.  

Challenges build character.  Working through them makes you stronger, but does it really?  Failure makes you feel weaker even if you gain knowledge, smarter, but weaker; life's energy spent on a path that led nowhere.  I hate this feeling.

Life is a series of transitions.  The cogs turn, and the clock ticks, and you move from one state to another, or you fail and fall back on the previous state, but with less optimism and less hope for the future--all of it is up in the air until it is the past. Victory or failure, you move on because the past is falling away under your feet, and the future is the only option.   The future can turn in any direction, and that is why we suffer such crushing doubt; although we pretend we don't, it's always there.   

It's waiting for me now.  Prove yourself, little man.  Pass or fail; it's your turn.  I hate this.

Breakfast at Old Tyme

I'd sell some of you into hard labor for lox and bagel at Old Tyme with a conversation with Irv over the counter one last time. He'd come around and fill my coffee sometimes, but most of the time, he manned the register and talked to me over the glass case filled with cheesecakes and eclairs. While doctors and lawyers, and professors, and old gay men made up most of the early-morning crowd.

In those days, I would buy a Clarion Ledger going into Old Tyme, and read all the signatures. I had a trick for folding the newspaper that alleviated some of my dyslexia so I could read and try to understand what was happening around me. Uncle Tom sold the paper a few years before, and the new editorial staff changed the entire outlook of the paper. It was more literary, more educated, and more liberal. I traded knowing everybody who wrote for the paper with liking everybody who wrote for the paper and never looked back.

My nights were rarely alone but rarely with the same person from one week to the next. When someone did catch me on the repeat cycle it was usually because some aspect of their life had gone to shit and they weaponized the "les dames" part of "dieu et les dames," but breakfast, breakfast was when I connected my head into the community.

At six-thirty, I met my father and grandfather to open the mail. Coffee for twenty minutes, then breakfast at Old Tyme. Lox and Bagel. Jewish food, the Jewish experience in Jackson, was centered at Old Tyme.

In many ways, the American Jewish experience defines the second half of the twentieth century. The Jewish experience in Jackson was hardly My Favorite Year or The Education of Duddy Kravitz. Jews here could get bombed out for speaking their minds. Living here, there was always a road back to Kristallnacht; only half these rednecks couldn't identify a jew on sight, so they'd have to reference each other on who to hate.

On my street, the Jews and the Arabs lived next to each other in peace. The Freemans and the Meena's and the Crystals spoke and attended standing cocktail parties together, and there never was a conflict, while down Ridgewood road, some good ole rednecks planted a bomb in Rabi Nussbaum's office. I was a kid then, but it doesn't matter because I remembered, and nobody ever let us forget. Living in Jackson, any one of us could become a monster. That was the lesson. It's still that way. Different reasons, same monster.

Old Tyme was gentile. It was neutral politically, but everyone was left of center. We just didn't discuss it much. The educated were always left of center, and at Old Tyme, nearly everyone was working on a book. A book that usually came from Lemuria, which was in the same shopping center before they moved across the interstate. They served slices of tomato with the lox and bagel. Fresh, ripe, Mississippi tomato with the red onions and capers, and lox imported from New York.

There were other places that served breakfast in those days. Governor Waller ate breakfast most days at the Mayflower, then again for lunch. Primos number two had a very regular Belhaven breakfast clan. Sometimes daddy and I ate with them on Saturdays. Lefleur's had breakfast. When Sonny Montgomery came to Jackson, he'd stay at the Jacksonian and eat at Lefleur's. Sometimes daddy would have a breakfast meeting with him there. A few of those times, I was invited along as sort of daddy's attache but also his protege. He would have been better off taking my sister. She was much more likable and much more interested in that trajectory of life. I wanted to do absurd things like make movies or write about nothing.  The eggs were good, though, and knowing Sonny Montgomery was a pleasure.

Due to poor design choices, Old Tyme ended up windowless. Once inside, you had to focus on your book or your paper or your food, or, god forbid, you come with a friend, which almost nobody did. It probably would have made more sense for me to find a place closer to my office in West Jackson, but there wasn't anywhere that great, and Northside Drive was a direct route to Industrial Drive; you just had to drive through a growing spot of urban decay before you got there.

Lunch was usually at the Office cafeteria. When I was little, the cafeteria food was fantastic, but as Annie Ruth retired and women who worked under her retired, we ended up with cooks who weren't nearly as talented, and food costs started going through the roof, so quality suffered.

Many lunches would find me at the Zoo with a hot dog and fries. The Zoo was my special place. I wasn't Boyd Campbell II there, I was just Boyd, and even the animals knew me. It's a strange feeling when an elephant recognizes you and walks toward you, and turns her head so you can make eye contact. If only she should talk. Marre would reach out her trunk, and I would reach out my hand. We couldn't touch, but we could almost, and contact was made. You're my friend, my old friend, and I miss you when I'm not here. I wish you could speak.

Old Tyme was a terrible place to take a date. There was no bar and even fewer pretensions, and the servings were enormous. There was a girl from Memphis who was miserable in Memphis and miserable everywhere else, too, and would visit me because I'd spend all weekend trying to make her less miserable, and she loved the food at Old Tyme and Mayflower. Her, I could take to Old Tyme. She was blonde and bright-eyed and didn't read and hated my movies, and was everything I said I didn't want in a girl, but she had all of my attention, and making her smile, even knowing it wouldn't last, was all I thought about. Not many women could finish an open-face Reuben sandwich with potato salad and a pickle, but she could.

Irv wanted to retire, so he brought in a guy I knew from Creative Crafts and Hobbies across the street to run the store, but it crashed and burned, and he ended up with a fifteen thousand dollar phone bill and back taxes, so Irv went back to work himself. For a while. Not a very long while, though. He shut the place down and sold off the cases and settled the debts, and retired while he was still healthy enough to enjoy some of it, and an era ended. We have breakfast places now. Broadstreet has a very devoted crowd and really good food, but it's not the same.

Jackson never got another Jewish restaurant. Nobody ever talks about Greek restaurants, run by actual greeks, or Italian restaurants, run by actual Italians. Chinese restaurants and Thai restaurants, and Sushi restaurants are all run by Viet Namese immigrants, but nobody has a Viet Namese restaurant, which is actually excellent food. We have lots of cuisines but no cultures.

I miss Jackson the way it was. Obviously, we made mistakes because look at where we are now, but in those days, breakfast at Old Tyme, Lunch at the Zoo, and tickets to the symphony at night with some raven-haired creature I was afraid to even speak to made me feel like the world was on the way up and there would only be good things in the future. It didn't work out that way. There were much more than just good things in the future. The future held decay and pain and loss unimaginable. Maybe I miss the days when I didn't know that. Maybe I miss the optimism of youth, but I'm pretty sure it's the Lox. And Irv. I miss Irv.