Uncle Frank - Film Review

 Alan Ball is a playwright and screenwriter from Mariette, Georgia.  He's a Southern gentleman of a certain age (six years older than I am).  This and other factors mean he often writes on issues that travel in my lane.

His most famous work was the film "American Beauty" which won the Academy Award in 2000 for Best Original Screenplay and for a while was considered one of America's best films until it was revealed that its star, Kevin Spacey, was about as creepy in real life as some of the characters he plays.  Among actors, this is a phenomenon known as "DUH!".  This isn't really a rule among actors, although it happens fairly often.  Vincent Price, for instance, was an exceedingly gentle creature, a dilettante and a gourmand; the only characteristic he had in real life that he shared with the roles he played was that he could be something of an effete.  In life, Price always kept his sexuality as a very private matter, but after his death, his daughter revealed that Price was a gentleman who enjoyed the company of other gentlemen.  Are you surprised?

Alan Ball is an American Buddhist.  He claimed that the inspiration for American Beauty was the trial of Amy Fisher and an experience he had watching a plastic shopping bag floating in the wind, a scene that was included in the film and attributed to one of its characters.  Critics felt that American Beauty helped redefine and conceptualize masculinity in the previous century as we cross the threshold into this century.  

Amazon Prime offers his newest film, Uncle Frank, free to Prime members.  Like American Beauty, Uncle Frank concentrates on the second half of the previous century but goes back thirty years before American Beauty and sets the film in the early 1970s.  Uncle Frank tells the story of a man in his mid-forties from a small Southern Town who found that a small Southern town could no longer contain him, so he moved to New York and became an English professor.  

Noticing a kindred spirit in his young niece, he encourages her to do well in school so she can choose any college she wishes.  She chooses the one where he teaches.  At a party at his New York apartment, Frank and his niece Betty (now choosing the name Beth) hear the news that Franks's father, Beth's grandfather, has died.  At the party, Beth also discovers that her beloved uncle is in love with an Arab Engineer named Walid.  She and her aunt are the only people in the family who know Frank is gay, and Beth is the only one who has actually met Walid, who they call Wally.

Frank and Beth borrow Wally's car and drive to their small Southern town for Frank's father's funeral, only to discover that Wally has rented a car and has been following them.   Wally fears that Frank may need his support on this difficult journey.  He knows something about Frank's past that might make this trip extremely painful for him.  They agree that Wally can come along, but he has to keep himself hidden from the family.

Wally knows that, as a boy, Frank's father caught him kissing another boy.  His father said he had a sickness, and God hated him.  Confused, Frank writes a letter to the boy he kissed, saying he can never see him again, with disastrous consequences.   These are the demons Frank must face when he returns home for his father's funeral.  

Any time you have a story where the characters spend a great deal of time traveling from one place to another, the story is either a travelogue or an accounting of a transition from one state to another.  In this case, it's a story about a man who never faced what happened between himself and his father but is forced to deal with it when his father dies.  He uses a lot of the elements of a traditional Heros Journey to describe what happened to Frank.

Uncle Frank isn't nearly as complex and sometimes disturbing as American Beauty.  It's much more emotional, though, and you end up much more sympathetic to its characters.   Paul Bettany, who you probably know as Vision in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, plays Frank.

There's a line in Tennessee William's play "Orpheus Descending" where Carol Cutrere says, "Wild things leave skins behind them, they leave clean skins and teeth and white bones behind them, and these are tokens passed from one to another, so that the fugitive kind can always follow their kind."  I always think of that when I read work by Southern writers; they tend to leave bones and skins and clues in their work so that their kind can follow their kind.  Ball does that with Uncle Frank.

The issues of gay men, born in the South in the thirties and forties, ended up being something I found out a lot about, even though I never pursued it.  These men recognized something in me that made them believe I would hear their stories without the sort of prejudice they often faced from straight men in the South, so they told me their stories.  Sometimes, very happy stories, and sometimes very painful stories.  

In their sixties, seventies, and eighties, they told me stories about when they were young and beautiful and living a secret life in a world that would kill them if they knew.  Watching Uncle Frank reminded me very much of those stories.  For men of that generation, there could be a real brutality that men pressed onto other men, be they fathers, lovers, or just others who would judge them.  

Beth mentions Truman Capote several times as a writer she admires.  The character of Frank would be around ten or fifteen years younger than Capote would have been in real life.  In the sixties, Capote was the darling of New York intelligentsia; by the seventies, they had cast him out.  He was constantly drunk and paraded on the Tonight Show as something of a freak.  I think there are aspects of Frank's character that are intended to be echoes of the younger Capote before he became a parody of himself.

Ball writes the script in a way that people who would hate Frank for being gay would most likely hate this movie.  For people who, like some of the characters in the movie, are able to accept Frank's sexuality as just one aspect of a complex life, I think you might enjoy this.  It doesn't leave you as drained as American Beauty did, but that's okay.  Sometimes it's okay for a story to not tear your guts out.  

Secrets in the East

I’ve been delaying working on this for a few days.  Sometimes, what I have to say makes me uncomfortable.

My father had eight children. Four were human: my two brothers, my sister, and me; four were not human: Missco, Mllsaps, Trustmark, and St Dominic’s. He tried his best to balance his time between us, but sometimes, living things are difficult to balance.  In the five or six years before his death, I would regularly meet my father and his office for a drink after work. He alone understood how dangerously unhappy I was and blindly helped me search for the solution neither of us could see.  On those nights alone with my father in his office, he told me many things as he reflected back on my own history and the history of my city.   

One day, not long before he died, he told me that he had searched as far into the west as he could see to remove anything that might be a danger to his children in the future, but he failed to look very far into the east. Anyone who grew up in a prosperous and successful and growing Jackson and then expected that to continue in their lives probably understands what he meant. Nobody expected the city to die. We were doing great, but we didn’t look into the east.

I always knew that my dad kept secrets.  I also knew that he kept these secrets because if he didn't, somebody would get hurt, and that made me sad for him.  What happened to Jackson, why it grew so rapidly, then broke and started to shrink, is a story he was deeply involved in.  Some of it he told me, and some of it he kept secret. 

To understand what happened to Jackson, you have to understand what happened in 1969 and 1970 when nearly half the white students abandoned the Jackson Public Schools and started something else.  I wanted to resolve, in my own mind, what his role was in all this.  He told me a few things through the years, but I wanted to validate what he told me through other sources.  I wanted to see his role in what happened to Jackson the way other people saw it.

My dad was in the school business.  Even if he weren’t in the school business, he would have been right in the middle of all this because that’s how he lived, trying to build his community.  He told me many things, but there were many more I had to find out on my own.  

I had dinner with my sister this weekend.  There are things in my universe where she really is the only person alive who can understand what I’m saying.  After everyone else had left, she waited with me for my Uber to arrive.  I talked to her about how I’ve spent over twenty-five years digging deeply and researching what happened to Jackson, our home.  I always felt like, because of who our family was and because of who I was, I might be in a fairly unique position to understand what went on here, why, and what the results were.

There’s been so much written about what happened in Jackson and in Mississippi during the “civil rights era.”  It’s become this really complex mosaic of different points of view and different perspectives, and I’ve tried to consume it all, to try and understand what happened in a way that satisfied my own mind.  Doing this for so long, I’ve cultivated a pretty substantial body of knowledge.

I told my sister I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with all this history I’d accumulated.  I could write a scathing tell-all that exposes all the secrets of Jackson’s society and its racist underbelly, but the story was so much more complicated than that, but even if it weren’t more complicated than that, even if it were just the story of a bunch of unreconstructed racists screwing things up, nearly all those guys are dead, and the ones who aren’t dead are in a memory care facility now.  There’s nothing I could write that could bring anybody justice, and there’s nothing I could write that would change the past or change the future.  Most of these guys are dead, but their children aren’t; their grandchildren and, in some cases, their great-grandchildren are still very much with us, still very much a part of Jackson.  Did I want to be the guy who put down in a book that somebody’s beloved Pop-pop did something horrible long before they were born?  

I still want to tell this story, but I have to be careful and be gentle with the memories people have of the people who lived here.  I have to try not to be a hypocrite here because I have already said some pretty rough things about Ross Barnett and Alan C Thompson, and I very much know their families and descendants, but I’m trying to make allowances for people whose histories are already part of public discourse, and people (like Barnett and Thompson) who made a particular effort to make things difficult.

That being said, in my studies, I’ve found that some of the people everyone assumes were the villains might not be.  My entire life, I’ve heard people from every angle blame what happened in Jackson on Billy Simmons and the Citizen’s Council.  I can’t posit that Billy was anything like a good guy.  He said, wrote, and broadcast some of the most vile racist stuff that I’ve ever been exposed to.  He was pretty bad, but If you look at the number of kids who ended up enrolled at the three Jackson Citizen’s Council Schools and the fact that they were out of business by 1981, you can’t really say they caused the problem.  There just weren’t enough kids in those schools to account for the nearly 50% drop in white student participation in Jackson Public Schools, and even if they were, they were out of business before the first class of kids who had never been in public schools graduated.

In 1981, former Nixon Aide and lifelong republican operative Lee Atwater was recorded as saying: 

“You start out in 1954 by saying, “N____r, n____r, n____r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n____r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N____r, n____r.”

Here, he lays out the infamous “Southern Strategy” pretty plainly.  It was never more relevant than in 1969 and 1970 in Jackson, Mississippi.  There were guys who believed everything Billy Simmons believed but didn’t like the way he said it.  In their minds, as long as you didn’t say “N____r, n____r, n____r” then you were in the clear, even if that’s what you were thinking.  These guys wanted schools that ticked all the boxes that the Citizen’s Council schools ticked but without being affiliated with the Citizen’s Council.  They managed to introduce class into this gumbo of race, class, and gender.  They considered themselves in one class and Billy Simmons and all his Citizens Council pals in another.  I have a problem with that.  Billy Simmons had the courage to tell us what he was.  These guys who were the same thing but tried to tell us they were something different were less of a man than Billy, in my opinion.  I can’t say that any of the things he believed were right or decent, but he had enough respect for other people that he would at least be honest and upfront about it and not hide it behind dog-whistle words like what Atwater was talking about.  

One of my fraternity brothers, a man by the name of Dick Wilson, tried to tell me not to judge Simmons too quickly.  “He’s a lot smarter than people realize,” Dick told me.  It took me a while to understand what Dick was saying, but he was right, Billy Simmons was kind of a genius.  You can look at his library now at the Fairview and see evidence of this.  What might tempt a guy with such a vast intellect down such dark avenues is something I don’t understand, but I’d really like to.  I’m fascinated by his story.

The influence of Kappa Alpha Order is waning in the world, and I think that’s probably for the best.  In 1969, it was at its peak.   When I look at the names of the men who organized and funded these non-citizens-council segregation academies in Jackson, a good two-thirds of them were KAs, mostly from Ole Miss.  We’ll be judged for that, and I think that’s fair.  These guys were community and business leaders; they could have said, “Let’s take all this money and effort and dump it into the public schools, and the Justice Department be damned!” but they didn’t. 

In 1969, most of these guys considered themselves at war, not with black Mississippians, but with the federal government.  Kirby Walker, superintendent of Jackson Public Schools, had a plan to gradually integrate our schools.  In interview after interview, he was proud of the fact that he had introduced black students into every school without incident.  I honestly think Mayor Thompson wanted a big, violent confrontation like what happened in Oxford.  He kept buying equipment and building up his forces to be ready for it, but it never happened.  

In the Alexander v Holmes County decision, the court decided that “justice delayed, is justice denied” and ordered the Mississippi schools to be racially balanced immediately. And in some cases, like Jackson Public Schools, they put the Justice Department in charge of it.  Kirby Walker spent ten years out of a thirty-year career trying to desegregate Jackson Public Schools.  He believed he had done a good job, only to have it torn from him and given to Washington Bureocrats.  In 1969, he retired rather than serve under the federal Department of Health Education and Welfare.  Upon retiring, he told my grandfather to say to my father, “Tell Jim to get those boys into private schools.  I just don’t know what’s going to happen with Jackson Public Schools.”  

That caused a bit of panic in my family.  Both my mother and father were products of the Jackson Public Schools.  They were our best and most profitable customer, and even with Dr. Walker retiring, my dad had many friends who still worked at Jackson Public Schools.  At the same time, nearly everyone he knew from Ole Miss was sending their children to either JA or Prep, and his fraternity brothers served on every board.  There was a time when four members of the Jackson Prep board of trustees had consecutively been the president of the Ole Miss Chapter of Kappa Alpha after my father.  For good or for evil, in the second half of the twentieth century, we got mixed up in everything that happened in Mississippi.

Announcing that the Justice Department was taking over our schools caused a full-on panic.  In it, with pressure from his own father and his father’s friends, I think my dad also panicked.  In his mind, sending us to St. Andrews quieted the voices, yelling that he had to do something while not giving in to the pressure to join a “segregation academy.”  Without a doubt, there were parents who were sending their kids to St. Andrews because it was almost entirely white, but there were also parents who sent their kids to St. Andrews precisely because it wasn’t entirely white.

There were heroes in those days, although we don’t talk about it very much.  Andy Mullins couldn’t have been much older than twenty-five or twenty-six when he fought off efforts from without and from within to force St. Andrews to join the Mississippi Private School Association, so boys at St. Andrews wouldn’t have to worry about playing football against any black boys.  Andy went on to fight a number of important battles, but that one must have been pretty tough, considering how young he was and how uncertain the times were.  As I understand it, St. Andrews still plays in the league he got us into.

I’ve made no secret about how much I fought David Hicks when I was at St. Andrews, but there’s something important I need to say about him.  David pretty quickly assessed the situation in Jackson and what was going on with the other schools almost as soon as he got here.  He very firmly drew a line in the sand and said, “This is what they’re about, and this is what we’re about.  Don’t ever get it confused.”  The school still operates under that principle today.  

In 1950, Jackson had one of the most successful and friendliest public schools in America (so long as you were white.)  By 1970, nearly half the white students in Jackson Public Schools abandoned it rather than stay and be a part of the Justice Department's efforts to balance the school’s population racially.  They left, and they never went back.  People who couldn’t afford to keep sending their kids to private schools left the city.

I often think about what would have happened if the scores of families who left Jackson Public School had banded together and decided they were going to make the best of whatever the Justice Department had in mind.  I think, within just a few years, they would have realized that they could handle this, and with a strong public school that everybody supported, there never would have been the massive white flight that decimated Jackson.  There were efforts from several prominent private school educators in the 80s and 90s who returned to the public schools and tried to undo the harm they had done.

Jesus talks to us about shifting sands.  There’s even a pretty great song about it.  Mississippi twice built its house on shifting sands.  Once, when we started importing people from another part of the world to serve as slaves here, and then again, when we decided that we had to keep these former slaves under our thumb and forever separate from us socially and politically after slavery ended.  What Jesus said about building a house on the shifting sands was true; our foundations came tumbling down.

None of the people in this story meant to choose the wrong thing.  That choice was made decades before they were born.  The people in this story were trying to navigate the world as it was left to them.  Their biggest sin was not questioning the assumptions they were working under.

In the story of what happened in Jackson, there were bad actors, that’s for sure.  Because I’ve been doggedly pursuing this story for thirty years, I’ve uncovered a lot of them, even the ones my father tried to keep hidden from me.    Most people weren’t bad actors, though.  Most were regular people trying to do the best they could for their families during a time when nothing made much sense, not the world they knew before and not the world laid out before them.  Faced with a very uncertain future, a lot of them just panicked.  Moving their kids out of the public schools into a private school seemed like the safe thing to do, and when your children are involved, nearly everyone wants the safe thing to do.

So, here we are.  Fifty years later, and I’m keeping the same secrets my father kept.  Maybe that’s my legacy.  Maybe that’s what he was trying to keep me away from.  What I know is this:  there were bad men.  There were many painful and ignorant and short-sighted things–but most people were good.  They may have been short-sighted or misguided by our tangled and snarled culture, but they all wanted something better for their children, even if what they were afraid of wasn’t even real.  

Jackson survived.  It just moved to Madison, Brandon, Pearl, and Clinton.  The city itself sits like a scar on the landscape.  A reminder of the good we failed to do.  I wanted to know what happened to my city.  I wanted to know if my father or I were culpable for what happened.  I think he was, and I am, but so is everyone else.  People use the word “simple” to describe Mississippi.  “We’re simple.”  “We have simple minds.”  “We have simple lives.”  None of that is true.  There’s nothing simple about living here or about being born here.  Our history is a mass of rose thorns, kudzu, shards of broken stained glass from churches where no one meets anymore, cornbread, and piercing sunlight.  It’s really hard to make any sense of it unless you were brought up in it.  Look as far as you can to the West, but look to the East too, when you can, and sometimes decide to keep secrets.

Ghosts of the King Edward Hotel

 Most "professional" writers produce between one and two thousand words a day.  On a good day, I can easily do between five and ten thousand.  Even if half of that is garbage (which it often is), I'm still ahead of the game.  

What kills me is the process of going back and not only correcting grammar and sentence structure but deciding what stays and what goes.  I'd rather have dental work than spend a day doing that.  Most of the time, for blog and Facebook stuff, I don't do it.  For that writing, I'm just making words for the sheer exhilarating pleasure of it.  

My other Achilles heel is that I'll often get eighty percent finished with a project and have not one clue on how to close it out.  Most people like writing with a dramatic conclusion to the conflict, but you almost never get that in life, so I'm not very good at imagining it.  As a result, I have about two dozen pieces in a folder named "unfinished" because I couldn't figure out how to end them.

One of these pieces I started a long time ago.  Before they renovated the King Edward Hotel, young people who weren't very good at balancing risks and rewards would sometimes break into the abandoned hotel and explore.  I always found that block of West Capitol Street fascinating.  There were all these really cool buildings with nothing inside them.  I knew they had histories, and I would often imagine what they were.  

One of these long abandoned buildings had an elaborate green and white mosaic in front of it that read "Bon Ton Cafe."  There were several places around West Capitol Street that had inlaid tile decorations like that.  The Mayflower has probably the most elaborate mosaic, but even Lott Furniture had one.  The Standard Life Building has one, but it uses big cut sheets of stone rather than square tiles.  I imagined, back in the 20s or 30s, there was a guy who went from business to business, selling his skills at laying mosaic tiles.  

Back before the explosion of the internet, if I wanted to find out something about Jackson's past, I had to go to the library.  I could ask the librarian, but if they didn't know off the top of their head, they pointed me to their extensive collection of Jackson papers on microfilm and microfiche.  I got pretty good at using those machines.  While they were fascinating to use, there wasn't such a thing as a text search feature.   The papers were organized by date, so the best you could do was to go to the date you were interested in and scan whole editions to see if they had the information you wanted.

Without a specific date in mind, I tried just pulling random dates in the 20s and 30s in hopes of finding maybe an ad or a review of the Bon Ton Cafe.  No such luck.  Since I had to make up a lot of the details anyway, I decided to make up all the details and create a false history for the Bon Ton Cafe, based on what I knew about The Mayflower, Primos, The Rotisserie, and The Elite.

Now that I have access to newspapers.com, I've gone back and checked for real information about the Bon Ton Cafe, and it turns out a lot of my guesses were right, but some were terribly wrong.   Since every restauranteur I ever met who got their start before 1960 was an immigrant from a Mediterranean country, I assumed the guy who started the Bon Ton was too, and said he was Lebonese.  That was wrong; he was from Germany.  The imaginary menu I came up with turned out to be exactly right.

Between the end of the war and 1960, businesses on that block of West Capitol did pretty well.  With the train depot on the other side of the street, they could always count on business.  They couldn't always count on the depot, though, by 1960, passenger travel dropped off considerably.  Dumas Milner bought the King Edward in 1955.  He modernized it by replacing the grand staircase with an escalator, then considered fantastically modern and impressive.  By June 1967, he locked the doors on the King Edward, never to open it again in his lifetime.  

Milner was a friend of my grandfather, and in all my studies of Jackson's history, he's the most interesting to me.  There were always rumors that Milner was connected to the mob.  Those were kind of true, but mostly not true.  My father explained it to me once.  In the old days (before 1980), all the banks had a policy that automobiles were not considered fixed assets (because they moved), so dealerships who borrowed money based on the value of their inventory had to pay off the entire note once a year, and then once the old note was paid off, they would write a new note so they could buy new inventory.  If the time came to pay off the annual note, and a dealership didn't have the cash on hand, it wasn't unusual for Jackson dealerships to borrow the money from New Orleans bootleggers or Memphis merchants and then pay them off once the bank wrote a new note.  If this sounds convoluted and unnecessary, the banks eventually decided it was too.

Even though Milnew owned hotels and restaurants and Pinesol, he made most of his money from selling cars, so when he had to, he would borrow money from these guys.  Besides all that, being in the hotel and restaurant business in Mississippi before 1966 meant you had to deal with New Orleans bootleggers because every hotel in Jackson had a bar, and selling alcohol was illegal (although, if you did, you had to pay tax on it) and at one point, Milner owned The King Edward, The Robert E Lee, and the Sun n' Sand.  To get around the laws against serving booze, these bars were all legally set up as clubs.  To gain membership to the club, you paid the hotel clerk a buck or two, and you got a card saying you were a club member and you could drink.  Milner owned the Patio Club, among others.

The King Edward Hotel Died because Mississippians quit using passenger trains, but they switched to America's new obsession, getting every human being in the United States to own a car, which Milner also made money on, so no matter what, he was in the good.  By the time I met Dumas Milner, he had retired after a stroke.  Most of his businesses were either sold off or closed down.  The Sun 'n Sand was still going strong.  My grandfather loved him and loved the fact that a guy who could be successful at so many different things lived here in Jackson.

I'm going to try and finish my piece on the Bon Ton Cafe this week.  It's an utterly meaningless story, but I enjoyed it.  It reminds me of being a little boy and eating at the Mayflower or Primos downtown.  When they reopened the King Edward Hotel, a whole bunch of ghosts flew out.  Maybe one of them wanted me to write this story.

Where to From Here

For many years now, I've been digging into Jackson's past, trying to figure out in my own mind what really happened between 1950 and 1970 with regard to Jackson's schools.  My initial motivation was to find out what part and what responsibility my dad and my Uncle Boyd played in all this.

For a while, I've been thinking, maybe this could be a book.  Maybe I could start with my High School Science Teacher giving me his opinion on what made my private high school different from the other private high schools, and then in subsequent chapters, writing out all the stuff I've collected over the years.

This project, at times, borders on an obsession.  Lately, I've been thinking that anybody I could hold accountable is dead.  Anybody whom I could absolve is also dead.  I was just a kid.  Nearly everybody in this story who is still alive was also either a kid or a very young teacher, and while very young teachers can be very brave, and some were, they were also not accountable.  

Part of what I wanted to accomplish was to resolve in my own mind whether or not my Father and Uncle ruined Jackson.  I think I've done that.  I also wanted to resolve in my own mind that my private school was different from the other private schools, both in its origins and purposes.  I think I've done that.  

Among other things, I can tell you that St. Andrews, through the years, paid a price for not playing along with the Mississippi Private School Association.  Even though St. Andrews tops every measurable aspect of a school in Mississippi, they still face challenges for not joining the Midsouth Association of Independent Schools.

What happened to the schools in Jackson created a panic that ended in one of the worst cases of white flight in the 20th century, a panic that left Jackson bereft of needed resources and a population that continues to decline.

I think my motivations for studying this were probably selfish, even though I was seven when it happened, and so were nearly all of my friends.  

I don't know what the future of this project is.  There is an awful lot of fiction I want to do, and I worry sometimes that I can't do both.  I'm also worried that I might be trying to vindicate myself when nobody is accusing me.  There's no real mystery about what happened in Jackson and what its impact was.  What happened in Jackson basically turned Madison, Brandon, and Pearl into Jackson, or whatever Jackson was, and Jackson proper is left as a sort of unresolved mess that a lot of people wish would just go away.  

A lot of times when I write, I confess.  This is me confessing.  I don't know where to go from here.  

Count Ohno and the Imaginary Dog

Tom Cotton was at work.  At sixty-four, he had enough life savings to last him about eleven months, so he figured he’d be working till the day he died.  He didn’t mind work.  He rather liked it.  If he died working, he wouldn’t mind.  He just wished that being a DJ was as good a job today as it was thirty years ago.  He thought a lot about the fact that, in a couple of years, he’d be heading into a new century, having dedicated his life to a job nobody really cared much about anymore.  

Everybody thought Tom used a made-up name for the radio, but Cotton was the name of his ancestors.  The only thing Tom made up for the radio was Wonder Boy, the imaginary dog that was the butt of most of his jokes.   Tom was the top morning man in central Mississippi for twenty years until a young fella named Mateer took over that spot in the eighties.  Mateer played Top Forty at a time when MTV on cable television had reignited young people’s interest in top-forty music.  

Tom preferred to pick his own music.  Some country, some top forty, with a focus on singers familiar to Mississippi, Bobby Gentry especially.  He’d been in radio long enough to know how playlist services worked; he just preferred to use his own.  In his current job, he gave out the station ID and the time before playing the news over the wire.  When he got to work, he played the day’s recording of the Rush Limbaugh show.  His station played Limbaugh twice a day, once live during the day and once recorded during his shift.  Nearly every day, he received a call from somebody who thought they were talking to Rush.  Sometimes, Tom would talk to them.  He’d done talk radio before, and it was nice having somebody to talk to.  After Rush, he played Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell until four in the morning, when he’d play the recorded playlist until his replacement came at 6:00 a.m.  Sometimes, he’d record commercials and voice-overs, which gave him a little extra money.  

As the night wore on, Tom’s job got quieter and quieter.  When he first started working in radio, the studio was on the first floor of the Lamar Life Building.  A glass window let passers-by look into the studio and see Tom at work and try to catch a glimpse of Boy Wonder, who Tom always said was outside doing his business and would be back soon.  There was some discussion in Jackson about whether Boy Wonder was a real dog or imaginary.  Tom never let on what he knew.  His current studio is in rented office space on the west side of Interstate 55, across from Devilla Plaza on the east.  He sat between the car dealerships and the Chinese restaurants.  When he broadcast from the Lamar Life Building, everybody knew where he was.  Now, nobody cares.

Sometimes, when it got very slow at work, Tom would answer fan mail sent to Count Ohno Notagain.  When Tom worked for one of the top media companies in Mississippi, they had offices and radio studios in the Lamar Life Building and an independent television station a few blocks away on Commerce Street.  

There were two television stations in that part of town.  One was the fabled WLBT, one of Mississippi’s oldest television stations and the only one in the country ever to lose its license for associating with too many racists.  WLBT was an NBC affiliate, but WLFB was independent.  Like most independent television stations, they survived by broadcasting syndicated programs, Gilligan's Island, Star Trek, The Brady Bunch, etc, and packages of old movies.  

Starting in 1964, WLFB signed a contract to offer “Shock Theater.” on Saturday nights.  ScreenGems, the television arm of Columbia Pictures, assembled a package of fifty-two horror films made before 1942.  Most were by Universal, but it also included King Kong, Son of Kong, The Body Snatchers, and I Walked With A Zombie from RKO.  

Most of the stations that carried the Shock Theater package put together a program where a host, sometimes given a creepy costume like a character in one of the movies, would introduce The Mummy’s Hand, Monster on Campus, or House of Frankenstein, and then again lead either into or out of commercial breaks.  

The station manager asked Tom if he wanted to do a voice-over to introduce the movies, but Tom decided he loved the idea and wanted to do more.  He asked if he could use the studio space where they shot commercials and do a program like they had in the bigger cities with Zacherly, Sir Graves Ghoulie, and others.  Tom still owned his father’s 130-acre farm near Learned, Mississippi, and there he had some woodworking tools he was pretty good with.  He made a coffin out of pine boards and stood it upright on a base with locking casters.  He could stand inside and open the coffin lid like a door to start the show.  He built a “mad scientist table,” also on casters, which he decorated with test tubes and beakers from Mississippi School Supply and blinking light bulbs he got from Irby Electric.  He built a throne with locking casters on the feet and decorated it with plastic Halloween skulls.  These three props would be stored in a corner until Saturday nights when Tom would roll them into place with a clip-on mic that dragged the chord behind, and he mostly adlibbed his lines, although he spent most of the week trying to figure out what he would say.  Boy Wonder, the imaginary dog, was replaced by Bubbles The Blob, played by his wife, crouching down and covering herself with several layers of plastic sheeting.

Mississippi Monster Matinee was the surprise hit of the sixties and seventies.  WLFB even managed to license it to stations in the Delta and the Golden Triangle.  School children wrote letters to Count Ohno Notagain and drew pictures of him and bubbles.  For a costume, Tom found an old Tuxcedo at the Goodwill Store.  It had some dry rot at some of the seams, but he was going to dirty it up anyway.  By thirty-five, he still had a full head of hair, but it was already dead white.  On a trip to New Orleans, he visited a magic shop and costume shop, where he bought a white handlebar mustache, a white goatee beard, and white mutton chop sideburns.  A little greasepaint gave him circles under the eyes and thin black lips, and that became Count Ohno.  Tom joked that he looked like Colonel Sanders in a Dracula costume, but the look was memorable, and his young fans loved it.

During the sixties and seventies, Count Ohno made appearances at the Arts Festival in Jackson and the State Fair.  For people of a certain age, Count Ohno was a bigger star than Doc Severson, George Jones, or any of the other acts the grownups brought in.  Eventually, Tom cleared it with his station manager to start a Count Ohno Notagain Fan Club.  The station always figured the show was six months from failing, so they let him do it as long as he paid the expenses.  He rented out a PO box at the downtown post office in the Federal Court House and started telling kids an address where they could write to him.  For five dollars, they could join the Count Ohno Fan Club and receive an official Membership Card, a signed 8 x 10 photograph of the Count, and a personal letter written by the count and slobbered on by bubbles, the blob.

As the seventies wore on, Screen Gems quit offering the Shock Theater, but there were other packages, including one that had early Ray Harryhausen films, The Giant Claw, some Hammer Horror, and Tom’s favorite, giant monster movies from Japan.  One night, Tom put on a lab coat, some thick glasses, and a heavy accent to become Professor Tojo Ohno, who talked about how horrible Godzilla and Ghidora were for Japan.  He thought it was incredibly funny, and so did his wife, but an irate German woman called the station to complain about the horribly racist portrayal of our Japanese Allies Tojo Ohno was, so Tom decided not to ever play him again.  It was just the one person who complained, but Tom was like that.  He never wanted to offend anybody.

When he started playing Count Ohno, Tom had to draw on the bags under his eyes and the wrinkles on his forehead.  He has all these naturally now, but he still draws them in as part of the ritual of getting into character.  Of all the things Tom had been, of all the parts he played in live, being Count Ohno was the most fun.

The station canceled the Mississippi Monster Movie Matinee by 1985, but Count Ohno Notagain still made convention appearances and command performances at Halloween parties at local nightclubs, like Hal and Mals.  He was always surprised at how many kids listened to his morning show and then watched him on television but never realized he was both people.  Tom never admitted to fans that Count Ohno was actually Tom Cotton, the radio DJ.  It was well into the twenty-first century before the secret made its way to his many fans.

For the Monster Movie project and other programs Tom came up with, he was often left to sell advertising himself if he wanted the show to go on.  Tom had a few places he could always count on for an ad.  BeBop Record Shop, The Little Big Store, and JL Jones Furniture were all regulars.  He sold ads to Mac Bailey Fine Cars in Pearl, where your job was your credit.  Bailey had a pretty active racket selling late-model used cars in crappy condition to desperate people on a weekly payment plan they couldn’t afford; then, after several weeks of struggling to keep up with the weekly payments, he would repossess the car and sell it again.  Some of his better cars were sold six or seven times this way before they quit working.

Tom could always count on Clarance Wong of Wong’s Authentic Chinese Kitchen and Lounge.  Wong was authentically Korean, but nobody cared.  His name wasn't Clarance or Wong either, but that’s what they put on his immigration papers, and he always got a kick out of the fact that he tricked the government.  Wong had a menu with almost thirty choices on it, nearly all made with the same ten ingredients, but your choice of protein.  Wong built up quite a reputation and quite a business over the years.  He wanted very much to leave it to the daughter he loved so much, but she decided to get her MD at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, and now she’s an anesthesiologist and not a very good cook.  

Tom’s wife died about six years ago.  He fell in love with her in Junior High School and never thought about another woman.  His father left him a little farm up around Learned with a house on it.  He and his wife lived there.  She had a garden and taught third grade in Raymond.  Tom always fancied himself a farmer.  His father was, and he grew up on that little farm helping his father with the beans and corn.  Farming didn’t pay what it used to, and small farms never paid much.  Once Tom got into the radio business, he eventually gave up on agriculture.  He still lives in the house now, but he rents most of the land out to a guy who grows Christmas trees.  

For a while, Tom served in the Mississippi House of Representatives.  His wife taught school, and he still worked in radio to pay the bills, but when the house was in session, he’d go from his desk in the radio studio to his desk on the House floor and do the people’s business.   As white people moved out of rural Hinds County, districts were redrawn to preserve white majorities for a while, but ultimately, Tom’s district began looking for black candidates, so he retired from the house.  He still paid close attention to every bill that passed through the Mississippi House Of Representatives, even though he couldn’t do much about it.  

As Mississippi raced toward the twenty-first century, Tom felt like his best days were behind him.  Most people remembered him for things he didn’t really do anymore, at least not professionally.  At least two generations of Mississippians grew up listening to him on the radio and watching him on television, but they were becoming parents themselves now, and fond memories of Boy Wonder, the imaginary dog, and Count Ohno doesn’t pay the bills.  What people do because they love it and what people do so they can feed their progeny are usually two different things.

When six o’clock comes along, Tom will drive back to Learned.  He’ll make a cup of coffee and sit on his porch and watch the sun rise over the horizon where Jackson, the State Capitol, the Lamar Life Building, and his wife’s grave lay.  If you can measure a man by his memories, Tom Cotton is one of the richest men in Hinds County.  For tens of thousands of Mississippians, Boy Wonder sits curled up at Tom’s feet.  They can see him, even if Tom can’t.    Count Ohno’s throne sits in the barn, under a tarp, ready for the next show.  Until next time, my ghoulies.  Sleep tight!  If you dare! Ha,ha,ha,ha,ha!

Brittania on Amazon

 I've started watching Brittania on Amazon. I'm not sure why since they canceled it before finishing it.

There's a character in it that's a combination of Oedipus and Lear, so that's interesting, although, at some point, I start wondering if they're going to do anything new.

I struggle with the historicity of the show. Everybody is wearing pants, including the Romans. It has a scene where a druid harvests mistletoe using a scythe, which checks with the historical record (at least according to the Romans), but the scythe wasn't silver; it was rusted and gross. The Druids, it seems, all have eating disorders. Every one of their men weighs less than 100 pounds.

They make the point several times that the druids and the Celts never write anything down because of some religious objection that they never really specify. That comes directly from Roman historians, but a lot of people question it, including JRR Tolkien.

The druids and the Celts wrote constantly. Everything we have from them is covered in the symbols of their complex alphabet. They grew flax and raised sheep, so it just doesn't ring true that these people didn't write. Tolkien and other historians believed that when the Romans converted to Christianity, they destroyed all of the Druid and Celtic writing they found. We know they did that with other cultures, including older Christian texts, so that seems possible.

Tolkien believed that among these destroyed Celtic and Druid texts were the original myths of the British Isles. He believed, as I believe, that myths define a people. Having them be "true" or "historical" isn't the point. The stories define the culture, and without our own myths, we developed our culture based on first-century Judaic and Roman/christian myths.

What's left of my people's mythology (the Scottish) is fairytales and ghost stories. Waterhorses, werewolves, kelpies and selkies. Tolkien pointed out that the texts we do have, like Beowulf, were Norse stories transferred to Britain by Norse invaders.

Some people believe that the Autherian stories are remnants of Celtic myths, but while those stories have a lot of Celtic trappings, they are decidedly Christian, which suggests, to me at least, that if they are Celtic myths, they are remnants that were Christianized.

Without any genuine British myths to work with, Tolkien decided to make his own, and that's where we get the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. Even that is heavily influenced by Germanic and Norse myths, but his Elves, with their elvish writings, are clearly meant to be celts, and Gandalf, with his pointed hat and long beard, is the very image of a druid (as described by the Romans.)

They do get a couple of things right in the series. For one thing, they have the Druids practicing human sacrifice. We have a fair amount of archeological evidence this actually did happen. They go a bit far, though, and have the Druid village decorated with thousands of human skulls and moments of cannibalism. None of that has any historical or archeological evidence.

A great deal of the show focuses on Kelly Reilly, wearing a wolf stole, a leather bustier, shooting a long bow with Robin Hood-like accuracy, all the while her auburn locks flow in the wind, with a mind of its own. All of that is pretty hot. She's basically a Celtic Xenia Warrior Princess. I like the idea of female heroes; it fits well with my people's mythic view of ourselves. I do wish these writers would keep in mind that flawed heroes are more interesting than perfect ones, and tragic heroes are the most interesting of all. Kerra's only flaw is her constant self-doubt, which becomes annoying.

Early episodes have Ian McDiarmid playing King Pellenor. It's like the writers sat down one day and said, "hmmm, what's a good name for a British mythic character? Oh, I know!" McDiarmid must be one of those guys who looked seventy his whole life because Return of the Jedi was forty years ago, and he looks exactly the same. He wears a beard in this, but once he speaks, all you can hear is, "yesssss, my young apprentisssss."

I'm gonna ride it out to the end because this is a period I am pretty interested in. That might be my undoing, though, because it'll frustrate me if they do it wrong.

Claymores are weapons that came out of converting the Scottish to Christianity, so I don't expect to see any of those (but I probably will). I would like to see some kilts, though. I can't think of a reason why all these weirdos wear pants.

Apollonia's Thunderbolt

There’s a scene in The Godfather where Michael is hiding in Sicily from the men who tried to kill his father, men who would kill Michael for his killing of Sollozzo and McCluskey.  Michael is out shooting birds with his friends and bodyguards, and he chances upon a group of school children on the street guided by their young mistress, a woman named Apollonia, a woman Michael had never seen before.

In a moment, Michael forgets about New York; he forgets about his father and the men trying to kill him.  He forgets about the army and the family business and college–he forgets about Kay, and there is only Apollonia.  The intensity of his gaze causes Apollonia to take a step back.  Noticing Michael’s condition, his friend says, “I think you were hit by a thunderbolt.”  and then he says, “In Sicily, women are more dangerous than shotguns.”  

Most men can relate to a moment when this happened to them, even if the thunderbolt came not from a beautiful girl but from another man.  I could say something like, “I guess it’s happened to me this many times,” but that would be a lie.  I know exactly how many times it’s happened.  I know the day of the week, the place, the weather, how she wore her hair, how her clothes hung on her shoulders.  I remember it all.  In sixty years, it’s happened five times.

The thunderbolt doesn’t mean marriage, a relationship, happiness, children, or grandchildren; it doesn’t mean any of that.  Unless you’re one of the eleven people on the planet who have never seen The Godfather, you know things don’t work out for Michael and Apollonia.  Michael ends up back with Kay, the true love of his life, if you can call what they had love.

In my life, I’ve always chosen not to pursue these creatures romantically.  I always did my best to get to know them, and even to this day, I have regular conversations with nearly all of them.  One of them reads my writing fairly regularly and sends me notes of encouragement.  In thirty-five years, we’ve never discussed the thunderbolt, but she knows.  How could she not?  I could take you today to the very spot where it happened.  It’s not far away.

My plan has always been to get to know these women as well as I can and become friends; then, if they want something else to happen, it will happen.   That’s always served me well, although I did end up getting married that way once.  I have no regrets.

A few weeks ago, on a day when I had a million things on my mind and lots on my schedule for that day, and that week, it happened again.  The thunderbolt only happens by surprise, and boy, was I surprised.

It was such a surprise that I immediately became of two minds on the subject.  Part of me was elated.  Even if I never saw this woman again, my old heart had survived every attempt to destroy it and was functioning as well as it did when I was seventeen.  The other part of me immediately said, “Lord, take this cup from me!”  Those sorts of thoughts, those sorts of feelings only look foolish in a man my age.  Part of me hopes we’ll meet again.  Part of me hopes she’ll get a job in Paris that leaves on Friday.

If you stood these five women, these five thunderbolts that struck my life,  in a line, hopefully, they’d get along, but also, they would look like five sisters, even siblings of the same brood.  I very clearly have a type, and I haven’t a single clue where it comes from.  Maybe it’s a memory of someone who befriended me as a baby.  Maybe it’s a lover from another lifetime.  Maybe this is the spirit of Shakespeare’s dark lady come to haunt me because she cannot rest.  It’s not just the color of their hair and eyes that match, but the shape of their face and lips.  It’s kind of spooky, to be honest.

I honestly hope I never see this woman again.  It’s cool that it happened, and it made me smile all the way home, but there’s nothing good that can come of this.  I’ve pursued these women before, and it can be disappointing.  One was the older sister of a friend, and with her, I soon discovered there was no cake in that cake; it was all icing if you take my meaning.

I doubt that’s the case here, though.  One of the advantages to only seeing women to whom you have been introduced is they usually share qualities of the person who introduced them, and that usually means there’s some substance there.  Usually, that is.  

We like to say that women are slaves to their emotions.  Men are worse, but we’re better at hiding it.  Men can also, some men at least, become slaves to their muse.  I think, ultimately, that’s what a girl that makes you thunderstruck means.  She’s to inspire something in you.  It feels like love, but it’s something much stronger and much different.

I know a million tales of guys who were nearly destroyed pursuing the girls who struck them with thunder.  I suppose that’s where the tale of the siren comes from.  She was so beautiful, and her song so compelling, that he flung himself into the sea and was dashed on the rocks.  Every guy I know knows somebody that happened to if it didn’t happen to them.  

In his youth and his arrogance, Michael pursued the father of Apollonia, determined to have her after her thunderbolt claimed him.  In case you haven’t seen the movie, I’m not going to say what happened, but his youth and his arrogance led to tragedy and pain, both for him and for Apollonia and her father.  That’s a lesson for young men.  The thunderbolt doesn’t always mean what you think it means.  Respect that.  These are powers greater than you understand.

Mitch Myers, Dan Rose, And The Call To Adventure

 Joseph Campbell, not my brother, but Professor Joseph Campbell, who taught literature at  Sarah Lawrence College in New York, studied epic poetry and compared its forms across cultures.  His experiences in World War II and his exposure to Carl Jung led him down a path that culminated with the creation of his theory about The Hero’s Journey or the MonoMyth.

In the Hero’s Journey, a character travels from a state of unenlightenment and naivety through trials and challenges and arrives at a point that not only transforms him but also has a transformative or explanative impact on the culture he came from.

The Hero’s Journey begins with hearing the call.  Menelaus calls Odysseus to fight the Trojans, Gandalf tells Frodo about the ring, and Obi-Wan tells Luke he must learn about the force.  My fifty-year journey has been about discovering where I came from and what made me–what familial, cultural, and accidental influences made me what I am.  Normally, this wouldn’t be a hero’s journey, but in my case, the forces that shaped me are the forces that shaped the country and, in particular, shaped Mississippi and Jackson.  The impact of these forces is what makes this a hero’s journey.  It’s not about what made me as much as it’s about what made us.

The call to action in this story came from my teachers when I was sixteen.  Before my encounter with them, I was satisfied only to learn the parts of the story that were unique to me and not look around the corners to see the whole image.  It was talking with these men that made me understand there was something fundamentally different about people in Mississippi who started school in nineteen sixty-nine, and talking with them made me want to understand it.  I heard the call.

Sometimes, you can hear a story many times and still only understand it once the right person tells it.  We know the universe through stories.  That’s what Campbell was getting at when he wrote A Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Stories are made of moments.  Moments are statements of being:  The bird is red;  The soup is cold;  The dog ran out. When you combine these moments, it makes a story.  “The red bird flew past our chair on Wednesday.”  Stories and emotions compose everything we know.  Everything else is just matter–the dust left after the universe made the stars.  

Turning 16 was not a good year for me.  My mother believed it best to try and treat my brother’s schizophrenia at home, which made being at home uncomfortable at best.  I found refuge in spending as much time as possible in weight-lifting gyms, primarily the downtown YMCA and Gordon Weir’s new Natalus-equipped gym. 

My school, a private Episcopalian school, was in quite a bit of trouble.  We had three headmasters in four years, and the new headmaster saw it as his mission to reshape the community and culture at my school completely.  That meant getting rid of several faculty members and quite a few students he saw as distractions and unleadable.  Feeling my community under attack, I felt honor-bound to do something about this, which seems ridiculous now since I was only sixteen and not a very good student.  The only thing I had going for me was that I was twice the size of my new headmaster.  He never missed an opportunity to point that out.  I’m pretty sure, in his heart, he believed he could take me and, later on that year, would put that theory to the test.  I also knew that my father’s name carried some weight, but I refused to bring that up as this was my fight, not his, and I wasn’t entirely sure he’d back up my argument.  

Part of reshaping St. Andrews meant that David Hicks, my new Headmaster had to replace the entire high school science department, having found issue with the existing one.  Two of his new hires became very important in my life and genuine beacons in my lonely existence.  They told me things and asked questions that made me hear the call to adventure.

The first was Mitch Myers.  Coach Myers was, at best, twenty-three years old.  From New York, his attempts to get into medical school weren’t going well, so he took a teaching job in exotic and remote Mississippi.  It’s not unusual for medical schools to turn down the application of young people in the sciences their first two or three times.  While Mitch was in Jackson, he applied to the University of Mississippi Medical Center.  His performance at St. Andrews impressed the parents at our school enough that they ram-rodded his application through UMMC.  Mitch got his MD in Jackson and stayed to practice medicine here for many years.

Mitch became very interested in physical culture in New York, particularly weight-lifting.  That became the common ground of our friendship.  Most of the weight-lifters I knew were tradespeople.  A surprising number were in law enforcement.  Mitch was one of the few serious weight-lifters I knew who were also educators and communicated at that level, even if he did have a strange accent.    

In 1979, sports drugs were just beginning to be an issue.  In Mississippi, there weren’t yet any laws against them.  A doctor in Jackson was even testing and prescribing anabolic steroids for the linemen at Ole Miss, a practice that would get the team suspended these days.  I was buying Dinabol from a gentleman who worked in law enforcement.  He was a bodybuilder, and I was a weightlifter.  He was a friend of Heavy Herb Anderson, if that helps you understand where this man fit into the world.  

Mitch Myers was also my football coach.  We discussed training techniques.  He liked trying crazy things like doing a thousand crunches in a day and suffering for a week.  His knowledge of chemistry and biology gave him a pretty informed opinion on steroids.  He was against the idea but didn’t tell me to stop.  He did make me promise to discuss it with my primary physician, which I did, and not to exceed the doses we discussed.  Steroids themselves aren’t addictive, but their results can be.  I wasn’t always very good about staying within the dosage guidelines Coach Myers and my doctor set for me.

During the year, Jackson Academy announced that they would add a high school the following year.  Since some students weren’t happy with David Hicks, there was talk among us of a group leaving St Andrews and going to JA.  One afternoon in the gym, Coach Myers asked me, “Those academies, they just for keeping the black kids out.  Right?”  

I didn’t know how to answer him.  I knew some academies were made for just that purpose, but by this time, most of them had gone out of business or were headed that way once it was declared unconstitutional for the state to pay parents an “educational grant” to send their kids to private school.  Where JA was concerned, I didn’t know the answer.  In the years hence, I learned that Jackson Academy was unrelated to the Citizens Council Academies.  JA was started when Jackson Public Schools switched from phonics to whole language and from old math to new math, and for some parents, this was inadequate.  There are people still who believe whole language and new math were communist-inspired.  

“I don’t know, coach,”  I said.  “They might be different, but I don’t know.  I’ll find out.”  I don’t know that I meant for that to be a promise, but it ended up being one.  “Finding out” why private schools started in Jackson, their difference and their effect on the larger public schools became a life-long journey.  One I’m still on.   I didn’t start the journey that day, but I heard the call.

Dr. Hicks hired a midwesterner to take over our biology classes.   Dan Rose was born in Illinois but traveled the world, including a stint teaching English in New Guinea.  Playgirl magazine named him one of America’s most eligible bachelors.  He died just as eligible as he was when they named him such.  

The biology classroom had a storage room, which Rose converted into a private office.  Unbeknownst to David Hicks, Dan Rose received guests in his “office” between classes, with the door closed, where he would tell you stories and share cigarettes and whiskey with you, if you had any, as long as you pet his dog.  That sounds like something I entirely made up, but more than a few can attest to its veracity.

Normally, when you’re sixteen, adults talk to you like you’re sixteen and tell you a lot of bullshit rather than the truth.  Dan Rose wasn’t like that.  Dan spoke to me about cigarettes, cigars, whisky, marijuana, and mushrooms.  He said to me about women.  Oh, he loved talking to me about women, and I needed to be talked to about women because I hadn’t a single clue what I was doing in that arena.

One day, Dan told me the story about Jesus and the pearl of great price and asked me if I understood what he was saying.  I took a sip and said I did.  He grasped me by the shoulder, looked me in the eye, and said, “I want you to forget every girl in this goddamn school and focus all your attention on Paige.”  

I told him I agreed, but so did nearly every boy I knew, and she had been complaining loudly about their lack of gentlemanly patience, so I resolved to (at least as far as she was concerned) be extra gentlemanly so that she would know I appreciated her in more ways than these other guys understood.  Even though it got me friend-zoned back to the cretaceous, I still think that was the right decision.  There were a number of shitty men in her life, but I wasn’t one of them.

One day, Dan Rose asked me, “What about Jackson Prep?”  

“It’s mostly a feeder school for Ole Miss,”  I said.  I still stand by that statement.

“I heard it was a bunch of pricks who wanted to keep the negros out.”  He said.

I’d never heard an adult lay it out so plainly before.  I’d rarely heard other kids lay it out so plainly.  Dan Rose put the meat on the table and the ball in my court.  I respected him so much and wanted to respond well, both truthfully and as frankly as he had been with me.

“I don’t know what the rules are there,”  I said.  “I know they don’t have any black students and never had any black students.  I met the headmaster but didn’t know him very well, and their coach tried a few times to get me to switch schools, even though he had gotten in a fight with my brother.”

I felt ashamed.  This was a very important issue, and I didn’t have the answer.  St. Andrews, I knew, had at least one black student in every grade, but I didn’t even know their policy about admitting students who weren’t white.  Now, I can look back and forgive myself for being just sixteen and not filling my head with these things, but that day, in Dan Rose’s stockroom office, I felt that I had let him down.  

“Let me ask around,”  I said.  “I feel like I should know this, but I don’t, but I think I know how to find out.”  That part was a lie.  I didn’t know how to find out.  I could have just gone to my dad and asked him to explain it, but that puts him in a spot both as a parent and in his job.  If I was going to find out which schools were about racism, and which schools were about something else, and what started it all, and where it all might lead, I’d have to do it on my own.  I heard the call to adventure.  I’ve been on this adventure for more than forty years, and I’m not done yet, but this is what started it all. 

The Way The Machune Works

A lot of the time, I'll start a writing project where I'll have the whole thing pretty clearly in my head, and I just have to go through the process of squeezing the tube until the words come out of my fingers.  I don't like to stop before I'm finished because once  I stop and do something else, it can take me weeks to return to the piece and finish it.  I have four really promising pieces in a folder now named "unfinished" that I hope to get to this week.

I'll never have enough confidence in what I'm doing that I can stop in the middle, go do something else for a few hours, and return to my keyboard and finish with the same energy I started.

This morning, about an hour before my alarm went off, an idea about a memory began poking needles in my brain.  When the alarm did go off, I thought I could get up and bathe, brush my teeth, shave my head, get dressed, and go downstairs to meet my ride that takes me to church, as I had planned...

Or I could write.

Children with communication problems can become very unsocial.  That was me.  If it's not dealt with, it can become something of a critical problem for the child, and they begin to lose what little vocabulary they gained; at the very worst, they can become functionally mute and anti-social.  That was not me.  I had three very vocal siblings, a very vocal grandmother and mother and nursemaid, and more than that, I had Martha Hammond's kitchen across our backyard, where I could sit and listen, and for whatever reason, there I could talk.  

I do enjoy socializing.  I enjoy church and Sunday school.  I was going to lunch at Hal & Mals and go see the last performance of Passage at Millsaps, but once I touched the keyboard, I saw the word count meter advance, but I wasn't getting closer to where I wanted to finish, so I typed and typed and typed and missed my leave-the-house time for Sunday School, then Church, then Lunch.  One-thirty came, and I could either leave for the play or stay and read over and edit my work.  I'm really bad for not doing that.  It's so anti-climactic and so unlike the passion of making the words new.

I suppose that makes me an unreliable friend.  I suppose it's always been so.  There will always be times when I have to be alone to work out the things in my head.  Sometimes I get them out and decide to show them to people, and sometimes I decide whatever it was I created, it wasn't worthy.  

I wouldn't wish the artist's mind on anyone.  It's not a stable or happy way to live, even though there are moments of ecstasy when what you create matches what you saw in your head before you began.  

The Agony and the Ecstasy is a movie about Michangelo made in the sixties.  It's also part of the deal for those who wish to create.  So are questions about "Who is that funny man in the dark with a pen and paper?  I never see him talk to anyone."   

It's not a matter of "this is what I choose."  It's a matter of "this is what I am."  and I've made peace with it.  If you ever expect to see me and don't, there's always a chance this is what happened.  It's not a bad thing.  It's just the way the machine works.