Whew...it's been a while. Apologies to all. I've been in ferment.

Like bread dough, or wine, I suppose. Anyhow: I've finally been persuaded by my literary agent, David McCormick, whose judgment I esteem highly, that now is not the time to try to sell my memoir. "Market conditions," doncha know. Plus there's what my non-soft-spoken publisher said to me when I first raised the idea to her: "Look, Tom, you're not famous and you're not a drug addict." Okay, okay.

What David has wanted me to do all along is either a food book or a biography--to take advantage of the success of my Alice Waters book. Well, what I've finally stumbled on is both: the life story of Craig Claiborne.

I know, I can hear the sound of heads being scratched from here. Who? Well, if you're from New York and you're old enough, or you're in any part of the food universe, of course you know who he was. For those of you outside those categories: He created the food universe as we know it. As the first food critic and food editor of the New York Times, he was all-powerful, and seemingly all-knowing. Actually, rather than belabor this, I think I'll just cut and paste a little short piece I wrote about him in 1999 for Saveur magazine:

"As food editor of The New York Times for over thirty years, Craig Claiborne famously did whatever the hell he wanted to do. In 1957, when he started, New York was tyrannized by a handful of stuffy French restaurants that really weren't very good, and on April 13, 1959, Claiborne socked them in their collective nose: ELEGANCE OF CUISINE IS ON WANE IN U.S., ran his headline--on the front page of the Sunday Times.

"One reason for that waning may well have been how few Americans really cared what they ate. It was the age of frozen TV dinners, tuna casseroles, miniature marshmallows, Jell-o. Claiborne was a natural esthete and a Swiss-trained chef, and he was appalled. But he was also thoroughly American. He did love the classic haute cuisine of Henri Soulé's legendarily snobbish Le Pavillon, but he also loved great Chinese cooking, and Italian, and Mexican, and Spanish, and Southern. He recognized that people who love good food are bound together across cultures and through time, and that the wildly various gene pool of America put us in a uniquely privileged position, if only we would seize the opportunity.

"Craig Claiborne embodied the equal opportunity of excellence wherever bred. He brought rigor to restaurant criticism, with the first use in this country of a rating system and a clear understanding of the techniques, the ingredients, and the artistry that must be combined in true culinary excellence. In The New York Times Cookbook Claiborne simply put the food that he liked best, and damn the distinctions of foreign and domestic, high and low.

"His writing for the Times came to embody a way of life, in which cooking and eating seemed always to take place in the context of friendship. Claiborne's kitchen on Long Island became a theatre of celebration, to which an invitation was both a command and a delight. Penelope Casas, Marcella Hazan, or Diana Kennedy might whip up a feast while Claiborne clattered away on his big IBM typewriter, laughing and sipping champagne. The great chefs of the world would answer the summons to East Hampton, and the event, as Claiborne would report it, was less a cooking lesson than a party. His friendship with the former chef of Le Pavillon, Pierre Franey, led to many years of collaboration; that friendship was so deep that when the Times, in 1972, declined to give Franey equal credit for the work he shared with Claiborne, Claiborne quit.

"When he returned to the paper two years later, the by-line would read, "By Craig Claiborne with Pierre Franey." When Claiborne, with a $300 bid in a charity auction, won a dinner for two anywhere in the world with no limit on the cost, it was Franey he took along. With intricate planning and a host of elderly wines, they managed to spend $4000 in a tiny Paris bistro. The meal made the front page and met with outrage and wonderment worldwide. It wasn't really all that good, Claiborne cattily confided. And the Times hadn't even known he was going until he filed his story.

"Craig Claiborne wanted America to become a good place to eat, and as usual he got his way. I wonder what he's having for dinner tonight."

Pretty sappy piece. Makes no mention of the darkness that haunted him from childhood on. Claiborne was gay when being out was out of the question, and it troubled him deeply. His last years were spent in misery, isolation, and an alcoholic fog (he died in 2000). He thrived on friendship, and then all of a sudden, after years, would inexplicably blow off a friend forever. The more I learn about him, the more complex and self-contradictory he becomes. He really does seem like a character from Shakespeare, heroic one moment, contemptible the next, blind to himself, then suddenly acutely self-knowing. It's going to be a doozy of a project.

Best of all, John T. Edge, the redoubtable head of the Southern Foodways Alliance--part of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, based at Ole Miss--has introduced me to a former graduate student of his who spent two years researching her thesis on...Craig Claiborne. Georgeanna Milam Chapman grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi, not far from Memphis, so we both know at least a later version of the world into which Claiborne was born. Morever, having been born in Sunflower, Mississippi, in 1920, he occupied precisely the social station and Delta culture that my father did, who was born only 35 miles away and seven years earlier.

There's going to be a big Claiborne powwow / celebration in New York on June 12, which John T. is piloting, and it seems as though everybody still alive who knew him is going to be there. Best of all, Georgeanna, despite having a baby just four months old, is coming too. (She's bringing her mama to help take care of the little girl.) It looks as though, assuming all goes well, Georgeanna's going to work with me on the book, and that will make the whole thing a great deal easier. And quicker. I should say less slow.

Meanwhile, I'm gearing up to head to Montana. I leave this coming Saturday, and about mid-morning as I near the Nevada line, my good ol' Techno-Violet 1996 BMW M3 will pass its hundred-thousandth mile. As I try do do every year, I will take at least part of the trip on obscure, winding roads--in this case a very obscure one north out of Elko, Nevada, to Mountain Home, Idaho, and then across central Idaho. That first leg from Elko is right at 200 miles and there's not even a gas station along the way. The M3 needs to breathe! at least once or twice a year.

Supposedly I was going to be there all of June and July in monklike seclusion, with Elizabeth joining me late in June. I was going to rise at dawn, or before, every day, and keep a journal as I did last year, except this year I was going to post it here. I'm still going to stick with that as well as I can, but now I've got to go to New York June 10-16 for the Claiborne powwow and associated stuff, and only a few days after I get back I'm off to Cleveland for my dear niece Dr. Kate Blumoff's wedding, and not long after that the Montana social whirl gets to whirling. All us summer folks catching up, dinner parties, picnics, etc.--you'd think it was the coast of Maine. And then we've got very welcome guests coming for a week in July: My best friend going all the way back to, I think, fifth grade, Bob Towery, and his wife, Patty. Somewhere in the midst of all that, I am determined to find some stillness, identify our daily-changing panoply of wildflowers, stand in the middle of Sweet Grass Creek and maybe catch a trout or two, climb into the Crazy Mountains and, this year, all the way to the top of Elephant Head Mountain, pick huckleberries and blueberries, get to know the sandhill cranes, whimbrels, godwits, curlews nesting out on the prairie....

Enough for now.

CHAPTER EIGHT: MORNING: 1965-1966

(This is the eighth chapter of my memoir, and the last one so far that's fully written. I'm now involved in a couple of other projects, and it may be a while before I return to this one. But return I will. I have promised myself to finish this--that is, to bring it up to 1993. A sequel will pick the story up from there and take it--well, I don't know where.)


As my parents pulled away from the curb in their long green Buick Electra, I burst into tears. This made no sense. For the three days of the drive from Whitehaven to New Haven, we had mostly sat in grim silence, in the grip of an unnameable malaise. All three of us seemed to be angry, but I think none of us knew at what; I certainly didn’t. Looking back, I wonder if we were just unhappy that we weren’t going to be together, however miserable we made ourselves together.

Behind me, Bingham Hall rose in mock-Gothic grandeur, filling with my fellow freshmen. Bingham was one of the relatively nicer residence halls (Yale did not use the word dormitory) on the Old Campus, the city-block quadrangle where all but a few freshmen lived. There were to be four of us in suite 1092, which comprised two bedrooms and an unusually large living room with a bay window overlooking the Green. None of us knew one another. Joe Seiter was a swimmer from Ohio, even greener than me. Simon Whitney was an eccentric intellectual from New Jersey, scion of a great intellectual family many of whose men had gone to Yale. (One of them, Eli, was the inventor of the cotton gin, the technology that had made possible the cruel culture into which my father had been born.) And then there was Rick Platt, whose Yale heritage went back almost to its founding in 1701: In 1718 the college had moved to New Haven, and one of Rick’s forebears was among the donors of land for it; Rick’s family had been prominent at Yale and in New York ever since. He had graduated from Phillips Andover Academy and was rich and knew everything about Yale and wore his comprehensive advantages without false modesty, and I was scared to death of him. He knew I was, and didn’t seem to trouble himself about it. I would soon learn that his blithe disregard of my discomfort was a conscious act of decency: To have recognized my distress would have been to condescend to me. That was the first of his countless kindnesses.

That evening we trooped into the cavernous Commons, where all thousand freshmen and many graduate students were fed three times a day. Rick knew and greeted quite a few guys, for Andover as usual had provided more of the class of 1969 than any other school. Ours would be the last class in which public school boys were the minority, but minority we were, by definition new and ignorant and, most of us, less well heeled, and we would in Yale’s nature’s way be silently demeaned as such. At least I wasn’t a bursary boy (a scholarship student, with mandatory on-campus employment), collecting others’ dirty dishes and mopping the floors. Rick introduced his three ungainly new roommates around with deft aplomb.

We absorbed much social information in those first few days, most of it from watching Rick’s ilk taking their places in the ecosystem. They seemed to me to do it effortlessly. The cultivation of that appearance of perfect ease was one of the most striking behaviors we could learn, or not, or disdain. So it was, by this and a thousand other half-conscious fine distinctions, that the freshmen quickly sorted themselves into categories, little knowing that most of them would wear their archetypes, like turtles’ carapaces, unchangeable through the next four years.

The smell of Commons also never changed, from morning to night or season to season. It was, most saliently, of soup—tomatoes, beef, celery, carrots, and onions its relentless theme—but also of disinfectant, bacon grease, old leather, polished oak, male adolescence, and spilled milk.

Milk was dispensed from heavy plastic fifteen-gallon bladders controlled by a valve that nearly always leaked a bit. Later in freshman year, when water-balloon warfare had come to define the common ethos of the Old Campus, Joe Seiter stood atop Bingham’s nine-story tower, wedged into the battlement and lifting one of those bladders over his head. Filled with water now, it weighed ninety pounds. He looked like Hercules. Below him—for word of his great act of daring had traveled fast—several hundred freshmen raised our voices in a raw animal cheer. With awesome strength he heaved the world’s largest water balloon into the air. It fell, twisting, and fell, and fell, and exploded. Water shot a hundred feet in all directions. It was magnficent. Never again would a bursary boy—for Seiter was one—be seen as less than a possible hero.

+

We were the last all-male class of Yale College. We were the last class to wear coats and ties to every meal and therefore to most classes as well. We were the last to be graded with numbers, seventy to a hundred. We were the last to suffer under strict parietal hours—no girls in the rooms after midnight, their hotels locked down like high-security prisons. My teachers called me Mr. McNamee, and I addressed them as Mr., Mrs., or Miss; never were they referred to as or called professors. We smoked in class. Neither the liquor stores in the neighborhood nor the University itself observed the minimum drinking age of twenty-one. When our magnificent president, Kingman Brewster, rose to address us in his perfectly tailored double-breased suit and his deep patrician voice, he said his duty was to provide the nation with one thousand male leaders each year. Even the lowest of us were superior beings; the highest were like gods.

Tradition permeated life at Yale, and at least in the fall of 1965, conformity to it was largely taken for granted. We would buy a big wool banner to proclaim YALE on our living room walls. We would order Yale-crested stationery with our new Yale Station addresses. We would subscribe to the Yale laundry service (which may have sounded déclassé but made its student operators rich), the Banner (the yearbook), the Yale Daily News, The New York Herald Tribune, and The New York Times. In preparation for the mandatory Body Mechanics course at the gym, we were photographed nude with posture indicators sticking out of us like sparse porcupine quills; many years later I heard that there was a gay-underground trade in these images. We wore Bass Weejuns and Top-Siders and heavy wingtips, khaki or gray flannel trousers, oxford-cloth button-down-collared shirts, crew-neck sweaters, tweed jackets or navy blazers from J. Press, White’s, and Chipp in New Haven or Brooks Brothers in New York. In any of those stores we were waited on like royalty—you filled out a brief form, and could charge whatever you liked. We bought ties bearing the emblems of the schools where we prepped (Whitehaven High School of course didn’t have a tie) or our new residential colleges (there were twelve of these, where we would live after freshman year—we inmates of Bingham were already assigned to Silliman College). We went to Mory’s on Monday nights to drink Green Cups from old silver trophies and to hear the Whiffenpoofs sing old Yale songs.

To the tables down at Mory's,
To the place where Louis dwells,
To the dear old Temple Bar
We love so well,

Sing the Whiffenpoofs assembled
With their glasses raised on high,
And the magic of their singing casts its spell.

Yes, the magic of their singing
Of the songs we love so well:
"Shall I, Wasting" and "Mavourneen" and the rest.
We will serenade our Louis
While life and voice shall last,
Then we'll pass and be forgotten with the rest.

We are poor little lambs
Who have lost our way.
Baa! Baa! Baa!
We are little black sheep
Who have gone astray.
Baa! Baa! Baa!

Gentlemen songsters off on a spree,
Damned from here to eternity--­­
God have mercy on such as we.
Baa! Baa! Baa!

At football games, we sang incessantly the idiotic fight song that Cole Porter had written when an undergraduate here:

Bulldog, bulldog, bow wow wow! EEE-liii-Yale!”

Entirely unconsciously, I aligned myself with a crowd whom I deemed to be Winners—not the geniuses or the great jocks but those who would be Winners in Life. They were mostly preppies, mostly rich, highly ironical in conversation, brutal in the putting-down of grinds, nerds, and losers. Nearly all of them had silly nicknames. From them I learned new slang: quiff for girl or girls; helmet for the brown helmet of shit on one’s head administered by an unwilling quiff; a-m-a-a-a-zing for anything above moderately good; flamer (short for flaming asshole), a blowhard or showoff; doon, a moron; weenie, a weakling, a nobody, a whiner; blip (short for psychedelic blippo), a longhair or dope smoker (in use until we all started smoking dope also). A few of these guys were pretty openly standoffish toward me, my background being so far below their standard, but many more took particular trouble to guide me in the mysterious folkways of their ilk. One of my best ciceroni was Jeff Wheelwright—“Wheels”—a walking encyclopedia of insulting argot and inside information.

“You should know,” Wheelwright recalls, “that I take credit for Garry Trudeau's ‘Doonesbury.’ The original doon was my St. Paul’s classmate Charlie Pillsbury (who later roomed with Trudeau and my brother Joe in Davenport College). But I was the one who affixed Doon to Pillsbury."

There were also formal organizations, seemingly hundreds of them—the Record (humor magazine), the Lit, the Political Union (every conceivable flavor of party, and much formal debate), WYBC radio, the Dramat, the Marching Band (proudly the most satirical in the nation—they would run onto the field in chaos before settling grumpily into formation), the Russian Chorus, the big whole-class teams in every sport, including some I’d never heard of, such as lacrosse, and quite a few others I’d never seen—polo, soccer, squash, rugby, and crew). Each residential college fielded its own team in all the usual sports plus fencing, sailing, wrestling, hockey, and bridge. Perhaps the topmost of all Yale traditions were the a capella singing groups. Everybody seemed to be joining something, or a number of somethings. Showing an early, inarticulable aversion to organization, I joined nothing.

+

I wrote long, passionate letters of love to Susan Love until she dumped me, by post, good and hard. My feelings were hurt plenty, but I had known it was coming. Now I could face the now. The quest for quiff obsessed us all; a great many of us were still virgins. As the days grew short and New Haven lapsed into its customary weeks on end of rain and fog, longing rose in the blood like rage. We piled into stuffy, smoky cars for mixers at Smith, Vassar, Mt. Holyoke, and farther. Girls came to our own dances by sassy busloads. Very few of us had girlfriends, and the preppies had very little experience of girls at all, so there was a lot of loitering at the edge of the dance floor silently pining, sucking down beer after rancid beer. The girls were fabulous, with long, straight, lustrous hair, short plaid skirts, pastel Capezio ballet slippers, silver laughs. I was a doon.

Eventually, despite all, a few connections were made, which led to others, à la “Your roommate should meet my roommate.” Through an old girlfriend of Rick Platt’s at Vassar I had my first actual date, with a girl a foot taller than me and the musculature of a fullback. I remember dancing with my nose between her breasts, which smelled rather nice. She was awarded a nickname, The Elk.

Then there was a very rich and very pretty girl from New York, who asked me to be her escort at her début. Deb party, deb party, I heard the term a hundred times a week. I had never been to one. This one was to be at the Plaza Hotel, and white tie. White tie, and I hadn’t even had a chance to wear my suave shawl-collared tuxedo. I took the train into town, found my way to the formalwear rental joint all Yalies used (well, those who didn’t already own a white tie), got suited up, and presented myself at the girl’s house’s door, in the East Fifties just off Sutton Place. Her little brothers’ and sisters’ toys littered the front hall, which was narrow and unprepossing; but then, as she came down the stairs in sparkling splendor, I realized that her family’s house was five stories high—like a real house turned on its end. My early years in New York had never introduced me to the concept of the brownstone townhouse.

In the next few minutes I learned how to hail a cab, how to pay, how much to tip, how a white-gloved arm rested ever so lightly inside one’s elbow as one mounted the stairs to the ballroom. My date had already rehearsed me on the promenade and presentation, and we got through that pretty painlessly. I saw a number of Yalies I recognized, but none I knew. She, however, knew nearly everyone, and much of my evening consisted of trailing along behind her, being introduced and then ignored in breathless conversations about wonderful people and divine places I’d never heard of.

The party turned out to be a charity ball, and therefore had a cash bar. This I had not been warned about. We drank a lot, and my exchequeur dwindled apace. Then there was the Brasserie, where we all went after the party, I thoroughly drunk but sober enough to be stunned at the price of the drinks, and how much everybody consumed. I believe there were a few in our group who splashed about in a fountain. By four in the morning I had just enough money left to get my date home in a taxi. Neither of us had had a very good time, and I never saw her again.

Rick Platt had arranged for me to lodge in the apartment of an old aunt of his at Fifth Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street. In the inkily empty city, with my return train ticket and not one dollar bill in my wallet, it was a very long walk from that brownstone. My only obligation to my hostess was to join her for breakfast at seven-thirty. I was still fairly drunk, and could not open my eyes properly.

“Where are you from?” demanded the grande dame, who clearly did not give a damn.

“Well, Memphis, but when I was a kid we lived in New---“

“Memphis. Ah,” she said, and rang a little silver bell.

A daintily uniformed maid—a white girl—served us a dainty little breakfast. I managed to choke down my eggs and drink my coffee and not be sick. I never saw her again either.

One bright Friday afternoon we hung a sheet from our bay window, crudely lettered PARTY—GIRLS WANTED—FREE DRINKS. We cranked up the Rolling Stones and faced the speakers out the window. Crude gesture though it was, we managed to harvest a few townies (there was a nice Yale word), in one of whom I saw a possible opportunity to dispose at last of my virginity. She was ugly, young, and dazzled by Yale. We went on several furtive, sordid dates, and grappled in the dark behind Sally’s Apizza (she pronounced it ah-beets), which she assured me was New Haven’s best (Yalies pronounced it New Hayven). She maintained possession of her treasure. I was not nearly as ashamed as I should have been.

+

In sexual foolishness and insensitivity I had lots of company. In academic matters, we all began with consultation and cooperation—a wise, kind graduate student ordained to be our counselor lived just next door, the gracious Dean of Silliman College enjoyed dispensing advice, and Rick Platt had the skinny on just about every course on offer—but once we had chosen our curriculum, we were each alone.

I have not yet forgiven Rick for urging me to get out of Rocks and Stars (a semester of geology followed by another of astronomy, a notorious “gut” heavily populated with jocks) and to sign up for physics, a full year’s worth of serious study. Three mornings a week, the class began at an ungodly hour (eight) in the faraway altitudes of Prospect Avenue. The book, the teacher, and his scribbled formulae on the blackboard were incomprehensible to me. The guy I sat behind had on the back of his neck a gigantic, red, and oozing carbuncle, at which he worked his fingers angrily throughout the classes I was attending less and less often. At year’s end, the teacher would call me in to explain that the only reason he had given me a passing grade was so that I might not be seen on Science Hill again.

On the other hand, our Bingham counselor wondered, considering my performance in high school, why I had not signed up for a course more advanced than English 15. How, he asked, had I scored on my English A.P.?

My what? Neither I nor my Whitehaven guidance counselors had ever heard of advanced placement tests, which virtually all my Yale classmates had taken several of.

Well, not to worry, he believed I would do well in English 25, a survey of English poetry, and he made a particular request on my behalf. I have forgotten his name, but never my gratitude to him, for English 25 under Mrs. Finkelstein was sheer esthetic delight. In the swirl and murk of family discord, girl troubles, social disorientation, and the nurturing of my self-regard, I had nearly forgotten beauty. Mrs. Finkelstein began our first class by braying out the opening lines of the Canterbury Tales in an accent composed of three equal parts of Russian, Oxonian, and Middle English, replete with trilled Rs (Whan that Ah-prrril) and back-of-throat unvoiced fricatives (the drrroughte of Marrrch)—it was gibberish, but it was beautiful. Soon enough it would no longer be gibberish but a symphony that plays in my mind to this day. How could this big, bluff Russian have so entirely mastered not only the matter but also the magic of all of English literature? Who knew, but she had, and every class revealed another facet of miracle. She transformed Spenser from irrelevant antiquity to shepherds’ songs of aching heart and sweet repose. We discovered that Pope could be a laugh riot. In Milton we flew and plunged and raged with Satan, imagining imagining [sic] all that with blind eyes. With spring would come Wordsworth, and what at Whitehaven had been a pompous thee or thou would become, through Mrs. Finkelstein’s passion and precision, a vividly particular, exquisitely observed object or person. This beauty, I came to believe, was what I was born for.

With the leaden exception of physics, I floated through the academic months like a hot-air balloon, aloft on pure residual ego and the hot air with which I filled my papers and exams. I loved my French course and its urbane Parisian teacher. I loved psychology, its Skinner boxes and penis envy. I loved the history of music, dissecting a Bach cantata, plumbing the ramifying depths of the sonata form. I loved navigating the labyrinth of the country’s second-biggest library (after Harvard’s, natch). I loved that I could drink bourbon with one hand and read Pound with the other. But I had no discipline; I had never learned to organize an extended essay or to look deep into the heart of a poem. Luckily I learned the high value much of Yale set on bullshit. If you could say it well, and I could; if you could spin out a wacky, hopelessly complex theory from fragments of philosophy, history, and the classics, and I could; if you could stay up all night till you lost all conscious control and some blue muse began to babble bullshit through your pen, and at times I did—then you could stay afloat. But only for so long. Sympathy was deeply ingrained in Yale’s academic culture, as was kindness, as was tolerance for personal woes and teenage angst, but eventually—after the old Whitehaven boy’s struggle to be the new Yale Man at Christmas at home, after the crush and exhaustion of Reading Period, and at last with the January-bitter blast of exams—bullshit started smelling like bullshit, my balloon ran out of hot air, and the only voice left speaking comprehensibly was that of the numbers. As a scholar, said my grades, Tom wasn’t doing so great.

And yet. What I was learning from my peers seemed just as important as what I was not quite living up to in the academic realm. It was hard sometimes to swallow my envy. So-and-so had been skiing at Gstaad last month. Another guy’s dad was ambassador to Japan. Somebody was going to spend the summer doing marine research in the Antarctic or making wine in Austria. They had read War and Peace in Russian. They played the harpsichor, they played the drums, they played golf at St. Andrew’s. Their family had a hundred million dollars and five houses. Their mother was a movie star. So they knew stuff, and I soaked it up thirstily.

Simon Whitney, another of my roommates, had made a perfect eight hundred on both the verbal and the math Scholastic Aptitude Tests. His I.Q., someone said, was beyond measurement. His uncle was one of the greatest mathematicians of the century. His father taught economics at Rutgers, and advised presidents. His mother played the cello. What I learned from Simon was that there was no limit to eccentricity. When his dirty clothes piled too high on his bed, he slept on the floor. In order not to be disturbed at his homework, he made a turban of a towel and wedged a buzzing electric toothbrush into its folds. One winter afternoon, when I had been reading alone in the living room for a couple of hours and it was time for dinner, I went to the closet to get my overcoat, and there stood Simon, staring at me blankly, saying nothing, only the faintest glimmer of amusement on his face. He had stood in the dark at least half the afternoon just waiting to weird the hell out of somebody.

Rick Platt and I stayed up late talking almost every night, till we were hungry enough for a second dinner at a greasy spoon somewhere off campus. He seemed to know everything. Or what he didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing. My envy of him and his tribe began to melt away. The snobbery and really quite nasty putdowns that figured so prominently in the behavior of so many Yalies of privilege came to seem weakly defensive. I hadn’t been able to imagine the competitiveness among them: To me they had seemed a bloc of uniform privilege. Now I was starting to understand that their swagger concealed that especially anxious insecurity which is born of the closest differences in rank. And they themselves, some anyhow, were discovering, with difficulty, that kindness begat kindness, and that unfeigned interest was more productive than the reflexive brushoffs of the unfamiliar that were their inheritance.

I also began to sense that the nonspecific longing that attached itself to sex or money or social power could also do work inside a poem, and yield a greater reward there.

+

So I told myself anyway, when the better angels of my nature paid me one of their occasional calls. I was writing poetry, and seeking beauty not only in it but everywhere—in a breeze, a tune, a turn of someone else’s phrase. I went to New York to visit a guy I knew from Whitehaven, a year older, who went to Columbia. Columbia was great—brainy, intense, cosmopolitan—and my old friend had become all that too. The Beatles’ Rubber Soul was just out, and we shared a passion for it; and now we shared a marijuana cigarette. As is often the case with first-time users, the effect was so unfamiliar that I didn’t recognize. The prescription for such neophytes is to smoke some more, which I did. Still not stoned? Torch up another one. Now I got it. Now I heard and heard into the depths of the depths of the soul of the soul of the strange new music of the Beatles, with its droning sitars and underwater voices. One day long thence, pot would turn around and bite me, but that winter night it brought me beauty on a filigreed tray, nestled in thistledown, scented with divinity.

All this intellectual and esthetic elevation was very nice, but it wasn’t getting me the thing I had most craved for at least the last three years, viz., laid. At the first surge of want—and these occurred about a dozen times a day—poetics, beauty, philosophy, and even the delights of getting high flew out the window. With both the townies and the Seven Sisters I had gotten nowhere. Now, along with virtually everybody else in my class, I invested three bucks in what I believe was the first computer-dating scheme, Operation Match. It had been invented at Harvard. Why hadn’t I applied there? They took only four courses to our five, and everybody, now including me, knew that Yale was much harder. Anyway, where was I, Operation Match. You assigned a value, one through five, to a list of your own qualities and then to a list of the qualities you desired in a match. Brains: self, five; girl, four. Looks: self, three; girl, five. Sex appeal: five, five! There were also yes-or-no questions: “Is extensive sexual activity (in) preparation for marriage part of ‘growing up’?” and “Do you believe in a God who answers prayer?’” After a very long wait (computers were slower then), I got a printout of six names, addresses, and phone numbers. Five of the girls being at Smith, I arranged to spend an entire Saturday in Northampton, meeting them one after another on the hour. Not one of them appealed, and I don’t think any of them liked me much either. The sixth name was that of a girl at Wheaton, a story for later. This was getting ridiculous. I had to make a plan.

It wasn’t really a plan, but based on careful consideration of the odds, I invited for the big spring weekend the music-loving girl from Whitehaven who had never quite been my girlfriend but whose intellectual bent would, I hoped, be impressed by this freshly minted Yalie. She was at Vanderbilt, no mean college itself though lacking, in my view, Yale’s je ne sais quoi of prestige. How Yale’s prestige would add to Tommy’s sexual allure I guess I hadn’t thought through. She flew up, she looked lovely, we danced, we laughed, we kissed, we drank, this was great. We were just plain comfortable together. Somewhere in a dark corner outside, we drank some more, kissed some more. A thin shell of fear I hadn’t known myself to have been wearing all these months shattered and fell away in a shower of ice, sublimated into air before it hit the ground. When we pretended to say good night in the lobby of the Taft Hotel, we agreed that I would sneak in, shortly.

It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes since our parting, but when she came to the door something had happened to the girl. Wobbling. Slurring her words. Eyes not quite matching in angle. She was just unbelievably shitfaced. This according to campus wisdom was to be considered a lucky break, if not indeed a necessary precondition. We lay down together, and I kissed her. When our lips parted, she was asleep. Well, unconscious. She began to talk, urgent nonsense, eyes still closed. She awoke, she looked at me, and a plume of vomit flew out of her mouth.

I put the ruined, stinking bedspread in the bathtub and filled it with hot water. I washed her face. I got her awake enough to drink a glass of water. I tried to kiss her, but she fell away, passed out again. This was not the plan.

She threw up again, all over her dress. Hm. Well, I had to take it off, didn’t I? And sent it also to the tub. I didn’t have to take off my own clothes, but I did. She put her head under my chin and resumed babbling nonsense, this time also crying—the only time I’ve ever seen somebody weep while unconscious. Did I consider fucking her while she was dead to the world? I did. But a Yale man would not stoop that low. So I told myself.

Sooner or later she was bound to sober up. The thing to do was for both of us to get some sleep. I took off her underwear, and then mine, so that we’d both be ready and randy when she returned to the planet bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and primed by half a night of naked contiguity.

I had no idea that she had eaten so much. By dawn the blankets, the sheets, and the pillowcases had joined the dress and the bedspread in the tub. I had found a rough extra blanket in the closet and wrapped us tightly in that. She half woke; I kissed her, ignoring her breath, which wasn’t easy. I guided her hand; it was limp, and so, soon, was I.

She had to make the Connecticut Limo to LaGuardia. “I’m sorry,” she said. She dressed foggily, and stuffed her clothes in a bag, leaving last night’s outfit behind in the vomit-soaked wreckage.

The student room rate was ten dollars for the two nights, which I had paid in advance. I now left ten dollars more on the bureau, with a one-word note for the poor maid: “Sorry.” Would I be hunted down and dunned a hundred, two hundred bucks? Which I did not have and could not ask my father for. Would I be expelled?

She left. Nothing happened.

+

I had been back home only a couple of days when, on June 5, 1966, the civil rights hero James Meredith, now a student at Columbia Law School, set out from Memphis on foot—carrying a Bible and an ebony cane, and accompanied by six friends—to march through Mississippi. His aim was both to calm his own fear, which still haunted him, and to encourage the nearly half-million Negroes of the state to register to vote, or try to. He made it one night and twenty-eight miles before he was shot.

His wounds were not fatal, and his assailant was swiftly caught. The next day, June 7, twenty marchers renewed Meredith’s March Against Fear. In a sort of miracle, dozens and soon hundreds of people showed up and joined in, marching two by two down Highway 51. I held hands with a black girl of about sixteen who was literally shivering with terror. As we passed, white people lined the highway, spewing verbal abuse. Scary-looking Mississippi Highway Patrolmen were posted every few yards to protect us—a big change from not long ago. One old woman shrieked from the porch of her rundown little house, “Buzzards! Food for buzzards, that’s all y’all are!”

When I came home that evening and reported on my day’s activity, my father and mother both sat mute in frozen fury; and so the domestic tone for the summer, indeed for years to come, was set.

+

Fortunately I had plenty to do to keep me elsewhere. I was working full time at the Whitehaven Press—Bob Towery’s parents’ business, you may recall—and all my old pals had come home from their various colleges with terrific ideas for revelry and deviltry. We roamed in packs from party to party, smoking, drinking, dancing, flirting. My parents left town for a weekend, and the horde descended. In my own childhood bed, the younger sister of my blonde bombshell of the summer of ’64 granted my life’s deepest wish. She was so drunk that by the next day she had no recollection of that glorious occasion.

+

The clenched dread that filled the air of my home stayed in me for decades, sometimes dormant but ever ready to wake. It kept me afraid of reaching, of touching, of risking honest emotion. It led to poetry of labyrinthine obscurity, daring the reader—the poet’s ultimate parental authority—to understand it. It could not be understood, in fact, because it revealed so little of its maker. I wasn’t alone in this situation by any means: The Modern Literature I was now learning to revere—Faulkner, Eliot, Joyce—blew smoke in the face of the reader’s innocent longing to “get it.” Soon I would come to know music and painting of the same unacknowledged hostility. What did the tone row say but Fuck You? I would in time be a protégé of Leonard Bernstein, whose music, because popular and accessible and even beautiful, I was taught to deem cheap and vulgar. I did not have the courage, or let’s say the knowledge, to dream of beauty as a physical entity, a substantial being, a thing that I could touch and could feel. Fear lay coiled in my heart like a snake in the cold, waiting for sunlight, not knowing, in its darkness, even that it was capable of striking, and also of crawling out of itself soft and transformed and vulnerable. I did not know that the opposite of fear is love.

+

And then, in July of 1966, a couple of my buddies from Knoxville—fellow veterans of that fateful convention—were coming for a visit, and I needed dates for them, and because they would be visiting probably only this once, it would be okay to ask out on their behalf a girl already going steady with one of my old neighborhood pals. I tried a couple of new possibilities for myself, struck out, and ended up stuck with my sweet New Jersey ex-girlfriend, by whom I now fancied myself bored stiff. So at the last second I made a switch: The Knoxville guy could go out with her, she was fine for him, and I could indulge my curiosity about Louise Rossett (pronounced “rosette”), whom I had more or less known since I was seven and she was five but who seemed always, though charming, rather remote.

When I showed up at her door and announced myself and not the Knoxville guy as her date, her face clouded, for to continue with me would be to violate the terms of going steady with my old friend. In the end, because we were really just a big group, not a group of couples, she thought it would be all right. Proximity crawled out of itself to emerge as intimacy, and intimacy metamorphosed in an hour into rapture. This was love, oh, love, oh, yes, and would be forever.

For our first real date, the evening of Monday, July 18, 1966, I asked Louise to join me at a Congressional campaign rally that I had to cover for the Whitehaven Press. The candidate was one Ray Blanton, an achingly bad speaker who, years later, would be a convicted felon. It was a notably poor choice of venue, but I was in a hurry. Afterwards I took her to Leonard’s Barbecue, and, on her front porch one minute before Whitehaven’s universally acknowledged deadline for girls to be home, I kissed her. She kissed me back, softly, seriously.

+

In the moonlit courtyard of the Brooks Art Gallery, the four marble Muses watched over us as we kissed and dreamed. I was certain that this was the girl I would marry. She was perhaps not quite so sure. I was certain that the recent loss of my virginity had at last made me a man, one worthy of Louise’s virginity. But she was sixteen—not yet an age when nice Whitehaven girls engaged in sexual intercourse—and though Louise was hot-blooded, she was not at all ready. We swirled around each other in an ecstasy of abstention, an ecstasy purer and probably more powerful than sexual congress itself might have been, unencumbered as it was with the complexities of bodies, timing, secrecy, fear, guilt, and ignorance that were to come. We peered into each others’ souls. I breathed the scent of her hair. She held me close, and we kissed and kissed and kissed and kissed.

We listened to the Memphis Symphony under the stars in Overton Park. To the Bitter Lemon Coffee House, Memphis’s most bohemian gathering-place, we went to hear the surpassingly strange and gifted guitarist John Fahey in his false identity as Blind Joe Death, wearing opaque round sunglasses and fumbling for his weirdly tuned guitar. We were thrilled when Fahey, now as himself, led our city’s own Furry Lewis onto that same stage, where, amply plied with whisky, the old man would flail at his slide guitar and caterwaul the rawest blues I’d ever heard. The Bitter Lemon served “cocktails” concocted of sweet juices in flamboyant parrot colors and served in brandy snifters. They were nonalcoholic, but nearby there was a pizzeria, run by an ancient Olympic bicycle champion—the walls were covered with photographs of his glory days—who, being Italian, found the American refusal to serve wine to minors an offense against civilization and who, therefore, with a gesture indicating his appreciation of our absolute discretion, would bring us with our pizzas little tumblers of harsh red wine he had made in the bassement.

As the summer was ending, and I soon to return to New Haven, not to see her again until Christmas, I decided to take Louise to dinner at Justine’s. Justine’s was a legend, a grand antebellum townhouse marooned in solitary splendor amidst warehouses in one of Memphis’s grimmest ghettoes, its façade unmarked by a sign. The idea was that if you didn’t know where and what Justine’s was, you shouldn’t try going there. It was expensive, and French, and most of the clientele came from the old Memphis gentry to whom Whitehaven, despite my mother’s social rise among them, was a backwater.

In those days, restaurants in Memphis were forbidden to serve liquor, wine, or beer; even to Justine’s you had to bring your own. The only place to obtain an alcoholic beverage legally was from a liquor store. I was under age in any case, but damn it, I wanted us to have a bottle of wine, and good wine too.

My friends and I had had some success in identifying ragged old men in parking lots who for a modest tip would acquire the vodka or bourbon or beer we desired, but hardly any of the liquor stores in Memphis carried much more wine than wino fuel. My research had now identified one store that had a wide selection of wines and would sell it to minors—only wine, and only if you seemed serious about it. I asked the man there to recommend a wine to take to Justine’s, and he asked me what we were going to eat and how much I wanted to spend. I said probably filet mignon, and five dollars. “If you’re willing to go to eight,” he said, “I can give you something you’ll never forget.” My love knew no limits, so I splurged.

The tall, starched, scowling maître d’hôtel at Justine’s slipped the bottle from its brown paper bag and started to hand it on to a waiter, but he paused a moment as his eyes fell on the label and his brows lifted. Justine’s invariable policy was to stick teenagers in a back room and serve them with icy distance, but now we were marched in state to a table in the old front parlor, beneath a crystal chandelier. The waiter replaced the regular wine glasses with huge glittering globes. When he poured me a taste of my wine, and its dark, sweet, soul-deep scent billowed into the room, I knew that this was going to be different from the screw-topped Lake Country Red which my friends and I swilled down at parties.

And oh, my. I had not known until that moment that anything could taste so good. I studied the label, telling myself to remember it. It was Château Lafite-Rothschild—a Bordeaux wine, I would later learn—of the 1961 vintage, one of the greatest wines ever made. Eight bucks.

CHAPTER SEVEN: FOREDAWN: 1964-1965

(The seventh chapter of my memoir.)

It was that time of night when the darkest gray gathers above the black of the earth and then a thread of gold parts them. Face down on Towery’s living room carpet, I smelled vomit and awoke. I made my way into the back yard to pee, and the gold was turning to flame, which was burning twin holes in my head, each optic nerve a wire of pain. Even in the autumn perfume of browning magnolia and dewy grass the stench persisted; it was my shirt.

We had discovered vodka. Towery’s parents were out of town, and his older sister, much amused, had bought us two fifths. Other guys were involved. There had been some acrobatics in the house—I seem to recall backward somersaults—and a broken glass tabletop. An older guy, with a driver’s license, had driven us around Whitehaven in Clyde, Towery’s father’s huge yellow Cadillac, so we could holler at people. With my head out the window I threw up, and the wind slurred the mess down the flank of the car to the taillights. We went to the Toddle House and had cheeseburgers and their famous Black Bottom pie. I think we tried to go to some girl’s party and were turned away. Towery and I had each gotten drunk, gotten sick, passed out, and sobered up three times.

The Towerys had wall-to-wall carpet throughout the house, and in said carpet there were now about a half-dozen Jackson Pollocks of agglutinated puke. His parents were due home that evening. It was Sunday, and the cleaning services we called all wanted to be paid double time—a hundred and fifty bucks was the lowest bid. Suppressing our gag reflexes with all that remained of our strength, we cleaned the whole house ourselves.

+

I had become a person who was not in touch with his own body: That drunken rout and others that succeeded it were a quest for sensation strong enough to feel. I ate for nourishment, not for pleasure. I played no sports. I no longer wandered the swamp: It was gone now, and with it the scratches and sprains and bites and stings—the touch—of wilderness adventure. That land of physical fear, populated by rattlesnakes, copperheads, and water moccasins, had been paved over; the swamp had been drained. I worked in the library and read mountains of books. I was in touch with one particular part of my body, but that did not constitute real consciousness. There were hands held at the movies, and kisses, to be sure, but most of the time my body was not a temple but a toxic waste site, thick with allergy’s excretions, virus on virus, acne, bad dreams, low cravings, and poisonous fear of the future.

Rarely, I told myself that I was mind and heart, sublime, ethereal, an emergent Man of passion and genius; a poet, transcending the bodily. Ha. Our dinner table had become a place of so much unspoken, so much concealed, such falsehood and spiritual absence, such about-to-snap tension, that our dogs lost their native gaiety and watched from a distance, trying to think about nothing but food. I had become, my mother said, sarcastic, and not seldom some sly word-arrow of mine would pierce her and she would snap, reeling off my lifetime’s-worth of crimes, misdemeanors, inconsiderateness, selfishness, and failure to take out the garbage. Her nose turned red, her brown eyes black. I froze inside. My father drank his coffee in mute support of the indictment. My sister cried and ran to her bedroom.

In less than a year, I would be free of all that. Columbia wrote to me inviting me to apply. New York! Yes! I felt it surge in my blood. Delicatessen, brilliant Jewish girls in berets, the dark perfume of the subway. The elder brother of one of my closest pals, however, insisted that the place for me was Yale. (He would be thrown out at the end of that same school year—a considerable accomplishment, for Yale felt that losing a student was a failure on its part. But no amount of counseling had been able to get the guy to class or keep him away from the bridge table.) Yes, Yale! Tweed jackets! Pipe smoking! Manly poetry, Goethe, Fitzgerald.

And so why not Princeton? And as for poetry, wasn’t there a place called Harvard crawling with poets? I have no idea. Maybe this was that second-place syndrome again, since Yale seemed to be second to Harvard in nearly everything. Boston University would be my easy fallback, and for no reason I can recall I also applied to William and Mary.

B.U. took me readily, Columbia wrote to me as “Chester T. McNamee III,” but it was a yes nonetheless, and William and Mary turned me down. Inconceivable! I was at my lifetime peak of egotism. I would sashay into the big grim room for the SATs, rush through the questions, and never check my answers, so that I could be the first to sashay out, leaving behind the ozone stink of fear, others’ fear; and I did very well on such tests. I didn’t even want to go to William and Mary, so how could they have turned me down? And now, worst: Yale put me on the waiting list. Was it twenty guys long, or five thousand? They weren’t saying.

Now I had to get in. Columbia had been too easy. Fuck William and Mary. I was going to go to Yale. My father, suddenly my hero, flew into action. There was an alumnus in Memphis who had given a tea for applicants and made quiet recommendations to the admissions department; my father called him and voluminously pleaded his case, my case. He wrote to old Met Life colleagues in New York who were Yale alumni (and well above him in rank at the company). In the most passionate language I had ever known to issue from his mouth or pen, he wrote to the dean of admissions, lauding to highest heaven this accomplished, hard-working, supremely disciplined son—I was of course none of the above except son—and, frankly, begging that I be taken. What other possible string might there have been to pull? None. No matter: After two weeks of dread, I was in after all.

And now my father would have to shoulder the financial burden of four years of Yale. This was going to be a genuine burden, but he didn’t want me to have a scholarship, or to work, or even to take a student loan. I have never been sufficiently grateful, I fear.

Now that grades no longer mattered, I gave myself over to the sheer joy of learning, led with the lightest of touch and the deepest of seriousness by the sort of teacher for whom so many sentimental tributes have been written. Whitehaven had a grand total of two “honors” courses: history (not much of a class) and English, the enchanted domain of David R. Davis. Maybe Yale would be like this, I thought. The scope of the class was all of English literature; Mr. Davis’s particular interest was in our understanding of it and our expression of that understanding. Although I had been writing stuff for years—pseudo-Romantic poems, eccentric little stories, my mock-bluster column in the school paper—this was the first time my heart ached with the urge to get it right, to be clear, to think ahead and organize, to seek felicity and grace of style. All these I fumbled at but kept striving after, and Mr. Davis rewarded my struggle with measured praise and stintless compassion. I began to unclench from the unconscious stoop that shrinking from unnameable dread had bent me to. I was a kid, who knew not much more than nothing about anything, and yet Mr. Davis was taking me seriously. I was opening up like a flower; I was happy.

My sense of smell seemed to be opening too. A good half the time in my younger years, my nose had been swollen shut by allergy, and when it wasn’t, the scent of any plant threatened burning mucosa, paroxysms of a hundred helpless sneezes in a row, the fifth hankerchief of the day soaked through. Twice a week I would be dragged to the allergist, jabbed with a couple of dozen allergens, then given a shot; eventually my mother, having practiced on oranges, gave me the shots, often painfully. They didn’t help much. A whiff of pollen or mold, and I’d be sneezing, stobbed ub, biserable. Now, though, all of a sudden, the privet along the roadside I walked to school, the wild onions in the lawn, the roses at dusk were glories. Shoe polish, our dogs’ ears, asphalt in the rain; Old Spice, Chanel No. 5, My Sin; smoke, of grass fire, Leonard’s barbecue pit, cigarettes (my mother’s, my father’s, my friends’, my own, for everybody seemed to smoke); a neighbor’s gift of still-warm bread, ribeye steak fat aflame on the grill, a just-cut orange; on dress-up dinner dates—my latest expression of coolth—the tarragon tang of sauce béarnaise, the long ago lost but now refound Boston-harbor scent of lobster, the unctuous voluptuousnes of real, fresh butter melting on the tongue—and, supremely, unconsciously but potently, girls’ pheromones: The burgeoning of my olfactory faculty, though I did not know it at the time, reinvigorated the evolution of my love of nature.

“What is love?” my mentor-to-be, Robert Penn Warren, would write. “One name for it is knowledge.”

+

The previous spring in Chattanooga, during my hour and a half of stumping for the vice presidency of the state high school press association, a pal and I had been handing out Vote-for-Tommy cards and chortling over the rustic dress and mien of the assorted yokels, hicks, rubes, and hayseeds of my potential constituency—“Didja see the cow shit on that one’s shoes?” etc.—when Whoa, Nelly! across the lobby came a phalanx of girls so good-looking, so beautifully turned out, so urbane that all we could do was stare and gibber. The political phase of my campaign was over; the interpersonal part had begun.

There was also one funny-looking, gimpy-footed guy, who would be one of my best friends from then on. One of the girls—tall, with wavy chestnut hair, wide-set dark eyes, and wide, full lips—would turn out to be for years the girl I would have married had I not married Louise. And another, small, with enormous blue eyes and a small, plush mouth that just said Kiss Me, was Susan Love. Oh, love, thy name was everywhere! Her surname was my command.

There was just one hitch. She was from Knoxville. Remember that Tennessee is a long east-west parallelogram, with Memphis in the lower left-hand corner—and Knoxville damn near the top right. Four hundred miles away.

I didn’t see Susan again till the next round of conventions, in the spring of 1965. After the humiliation of the summer before, I had found a less dangerous sort of girlfriend, quiet and intellectual, with pale, pale skin and truly black hair. She opened my ears—to Dvořák’s New World, Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, Rubinstein playing the Moonlight and Pathétique. Her voice was low and gentle, her manner calmly genteel. We talked and talked. And kissed, some, with moderate passion. We never went steady, indeed I was in permanent second place, because she also went out with one of my friends and academic competitors. A couple of years later I would learn that he had seen his father shoot his mother dead and that his dates with this soft, fine girl nearly always culminated in a brutal dry rape; and she never spoke a word.

And then came Nashville, the Andrew Jackson Hotel, and Susan, and kisses, kisses deep and soft, kisses again and again. We rode in a taxicab, her first time to do so. We ordered our first takeout Chinese food. We sat on my hotel room bed to eat it, and one of the Whitehaven chaperones busted in on us with a fusillade of reproach, and somehow I found the moxie to tell her off in return, and she steamed out defeated; Susan and I resumed learning to use chopsticks. We put price tags on the artwork in the hotel halls. In a junk store I bought a toilet. When I got it home, my mother’s reaction was surprisingly quiet. She now knew that I was nuts.

Graduation was approaching. Under my father’s proud guidance, I got my first tuxedo. There were parties at the country club, the University Club, churches, hotels, big houses with big lawns and shrub-shadows where couples embraced. There was the senior tea. There were the Key Club banquet, the Honor Banquet, a banquet for the top-ranking four percent of all the seniors in Shelby County. Mr. Davis gave a small, elegant party at his house for his best students—the proudest occasion of all, in all this whirl, for those of us so honored. And there was the Twirp Dance, a costume party to which the girls asked the boys. Much to my astonishment, my perfidious blonde inamorata of the summer before invited me, and proposed that we go as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. She procured overalls, a work shirt, and heavy boots, and with mascara she beautifully recreated the scraggy sideburns and wispy beard of the man himself. For me she found a long black wig, an A-line dress (short enough to make the most of my shapely, very hairy legs), and a pair of high-heeled sandals.

Susan took the train all the way from Knoxville to be my date at the Senior Prom. Here was an impossible romance if ever there was one: Come fall, I was going to be in New Haven, Connecticut, Susan in some Tennessee hill town. (She could easily have gone anywhere, had her benighted parents not insisted on imprisoning her in a little bible college close to home yet also essentially inescapable.) We would be eight hundred miles apart in physical distance, even farther in other ways. I was nonetheless rapturously in love, and certain of our glorious future together, which you may take as indicative of many delusions to come.

We danced, we kissed, I was the gladdest knight at the ball, she the most beautiful belle. We wrote impassioned letters all summer. I went to Knoxville in August; more kisses, more professions of permanence.

Towery gave me one of his looks—man of the world, my friend, my pitier—and said, We need to go to New Orleans.

Our first dinner was at Antoine’s, the city’s grandest, most overbearing restaurant. Generations of New Orleans’ crusty, insular upper crust had been coddled here, each family with its “own” waiter, dishes specially prepared only for them, and their own particular table in one of the many little back rooms reached by a labyrinth both physical and social. Tourists were herded with something less than ceremony into the big front dining room. I was wearing my first double-breasted suit—navy, “summer-weight” wool, so named by someone who had never been to New Orleans in August—and was drenched in sweat. The menu was entirely in French, which was fine with me. I’d had two good years of it, and moreover had been studying up on food words.

“Le Service ‘Chez Antoine’ Strictement à la Carte,” the menu began, threateningly. Meaning: no free vegetables, no fixed-price bargain meals, you pay for everything except salt, pepper, water, and maybe a toothpick. There seemed to be hundreds of dishes, many with names comprehensible only to the grandees of the labyrinth: Canapé Balthazar, Crevettes à la Richman, Les Busters Grillés, Oeuf Sardou, Filet de Boeuf Robespierre en Casserole, Pigeonneau Sauce Paradis, Tomate Frappée à la Jules Caesar.

The waiter actually had a thin black mustache and slicked-back hair; also the posture of a Marine at attention. “Bonsoir,” Towery and I greeted him gaily, in chorus.

“Good evening, gentlemen.”

Was he smiling? If so, was it in mockery? I gestured helplessly at the wilderness of the menu.

“You will allow me perhaps to suggest to you a few things?” The smile was real, and not even of amusement. He was being nice to us. We’d been warned not to expect anything of the sort. “Antoine’s, of course, is the originator of Oysters Rockefeller. I recommend you start with them. To follow, perfect would be our tournedos with sauce béarnaise. It is a type of small filet of beef. We are also famous for our pommes soufflés; you will see. Creamed spinach? Very good. And now, on the wine list—"

This was what was so utterly cool about New Orleans. The drinking age was universally disregarded.

“—We cannot go wrong with a fine red Bordeaux. Perhaps—“

Here he pointed, his index fingertip resting tactfully under the price. “Why not?” we said, bons vivants to the coeur. I can’t remember what château it was, but at that price it was surely one of the greats.

The wine arrived in a silver basket, reclining in the attitude of an ancient Roman banqueter. We watched transfixed the cutting of the capsule, the slow pulling of the cork, the meticulous pour of perhaps a tablespoon into a miniature wine glass. The waiter lifted it to the light, swirled it, stuck his big in as far as it would go, inhaled deeply, took a taste, chewed on it, smacked his lips once, smiled, bowed slightly, and poured, an inch each in our glasses with bowls four times that deep. We raised them to each other, and then to the waiter, and sipped. We actually had no idea whether it was delicious or not, but we were sure it was delicious because it was so expensive.

The oysters Rockefeller arrived steaming, nestled in blazing-hot rock salt and shrouded in a green glop tasting vaguely of licorice. “This is either the best or the weirdest thing I’ve ever put in my mouth,” said Towery. “And don’t try it yet. I just burned the shit out of my tongue.”

I waited, then tasted. “The weirdest and the best.”

The tournedos weren’t much bigger around than a silver dollar but a good inch thick. We each got two, atop a slick of some wine-dark sauce and topped in turn with an epiphany—comprising, I would learn one day ages thence, butter, egg yolk, shallots, vinegar, tarragon, and, at least chez Antoine, manna. The potatoes were crisp little pillows that burst with a crackle on the tongue, releasing some other divine essence in the form of a vapor that rose to the brain and blessed it. And: Wine, O Wine, for ever shall I love thee.

A junior waiter pushed a cart of polished wood and brass to our tableside. I was pretty sure we’d ordered the crêpes Suzette, or, that is, we’d accepted our savior’s suggestion. We had no idea what they were. He arrived, turned the little thin pancakes gently in a chafing dish, poured brandy over, and set them alight. I don’t need to tell you how good they were. Couldn’t anyway.

We floated to the door; our waiter bowed us solemnly out. New Orleans air engulfed us; sweat burst from our brows, ran down our inner arms, pooled in our shoes. We wandered, drunk, in bliss.

We remained drunk for the next several days. It was customary in New Orleans, we learned happily, to greet the morning with a strongly alcoholic eye-opener. Brennan’s Restaurant gave birth to this evil tradition, and it was there at the source that we conducted our explorations. The Absinthe Suissesse was nice, the Ramos Gin Fizz a knockout in more ways than one, but our favorite, hands down, was Milk Punch—brandy, light cream, powdered sugar, and a dash of vanilla, with fresh nutmeg grated on top. At Galatoire’s we had turtle soup, trout amandine, white Burgundy, and a stiff dose of New Orleans rudeness. We ate three or four dozen oysters at the Acme. We had beignets and chicory coffee at the Café du Monde. It was ninety degrees with ninety-percent humidity at midnight, but we prowled merrily on, profusely exuding ethanol, other toxins, and salt. We lurched through the streets drinking tall, red, vile Hurricanes, as did so many of our fellow-revelers, whom from time to time we would regale with old Boy Scout songs. We sat on the hard benches of Preservation Hall and listened to suspendered old men with leather skin play the best dixieland in the world. This was the greatest place in the world. And by the way, wasn’t the world a great place.

Our last night, drunker than ever by a considerable degree, I urinated on a fire hydrant in in Jackson Square in full view of the surging crowds and a horrified Towery. We both vomited in the gutter a couple of times. All good visitors to New Orleans, we reasoned, did that. Une tradition de plus, non?

There was still one thing we hadn’t done. We hailed a cab and asked the driver to take us to a whorehouse. We traveled down dark streets into the voodoo netherland of the real, tourist-averse French Quarter, where knives glinted in the summer air, where Stagger Lee left Billy bleeding on the barroom floor, where dice and drugs and wailing clarinets ruled the night.
The taxi pulled up at a lonesome corner. “Just down deah, haifway down de block,” growled the cabbie, in a voice of ten thousand reefers. “Wheh dem lights at.” We tipped the hell out of him and tottered toward the lights and glory. It was a police station.

CHAPTER SIX: DISTANT LIGHTNING: 1963-1964

(This is the sixth chapter of my memoir.)

The interstate still wasn’t finished into Mississippi, so we rode old thrumming two-lane Highway 51 to Oxford, where Ole Miss was playing what was always the game of the year, against Mississippi State. We brought Dr. Jim Biles with us. Dr. Biles’s daddy, also a doctor, had birthed my daddy, and the son had birthed me. Dr. Biles had gone to Columbia Medical School and done postgraduate work at Heidelberg; he was a learned, careful, funny man, an excellent physician; but he was a Mississippi white man to the core, a casual, carefree, absolute racist. I now considered myself an official representative of the Civil Rights Movement, and I angrily pointed out the miserable, falling-down shacks past which we glided mile after mile. “Tommy?” he cried, in his high, hoarse, perpetually amused voice, his grammar parodic. “What you don’t understand is that those niggers happy like that. They happy! Long as nobody mess with them.”

There was a lot of messing in 1963. George Wallace, newly elected governor of Alabama, roared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!” Martin Luther King and his fast-growing army of followers were repeatedly arrested in protests against segregation. A Ku Klux Klansman murdered one of them, Medgar Evers, in Mississippi, and was exonerated by an all-white jury. The polite usage was no longer the passive, mild “colored” but strong, oppositional “black.” James Meredith had just become the first black graduate of Ole Miss, after four years of being cussed and spat at. Rednecks had firebombed a black church in Alabama and killed four little girls. Dr. King, as we faithful called him, proclaimed his dream, that his own four little children “will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Dr. Biles’s easy use of “nigger” was, I believe, half unconscious and half to provoke me. My father, no fan of Martin Luther King or his movement, was not much of a racist, but neither did he challenge his friend’s bluster or his choice of language. We were supposed to be having a good time today.

Dr. Biles was a proud graduate of Ole Miss, and my father, a native Mississippian, though he had actually gone to Georgia Tech (and had had to drop out to help his family through the Depression), had through the years made himself a virtual Ole Miss alumnus. Daddy was in ecstasy when, as this season, as so often, the Rebels were invincible. (And yes, they were named for the soldiers of the Confederacy, whose stars and bars adorned their helmets and the thousands of battle flags waving fiercely in the stands.) Johnny Vaught had been coaching, and winning and winning, since the year I was born.

We found shade and a sea of others like us under the grand old oaks and magnolias of the Grove. There we laid out the picnic that Mama and Mrs. Biles had fixed us—cold fried chicken, deviled eggs, potato salad, cole slaw, country ham biscuits, coconut cake, a thermos of hot sweet coffee—and my anger melted away in the warm flow of joy all around us. Dr. Biles took an occasional modest nip from a silver flask, in which my father, the son of a binge drinker, did not share. From time to time, the famous cheer would arise spontaneously:

Are you ready?
Hell, yeah! Damn right!
Hotty toddy, God almighty
Who in the hell are we, hey!
Flim flam, fim bam!
OLE MISS, BY DAMN!

Ole Miss and Mississippi State played to a tie.

+

So grave was the principal’s voice on the public address system that our chemistry class, and indeed the whole school, fell instantly silent. President Kennedy had been killed. Billy Crawford—one of the boys on our block though not really one of us—rose to his feet, stabbed his fist into the air, and yelled, “We got him!” Billy’s mother was a snap-tempered, much-reviled guidance counselor at Whitehaven High School, as well as a member of the John Birch Society, which was anathema to even the farthest-right of our parents’ plenty-conservative cohort; and she had thoroughly indoctrinated her son. No one spoke, and he sat back down. The silence was long, and then girls began to cry, and then boys.

+

The board of directors of the Whitehaven Methodist Church, under the chairmanship of Charles T. McNamee, Jr., voted, in 1964, to move our eleven-o’clock Sunday service to ten-fifty, in order to give us a ten-minute head start on the Presbyterians and Episcopalians for lunch at the Whitehaven Country Club.

My favorite Sunday lunch there was fried frogs’ legs and mashed potatoes with brown gravy. I also loved, as did my mother, the lobster Newburg, aromatic with cooking sherry. I also loved, as did my sister, the South African Rock Lobster Tail with drawn butter. Roosevelt, the chef, made a legendary banana cream pie, but I preferred his parfait, layer on bright layer of ice creams and whipped cream in a tall tapered glass. We drank iced tea at all seasons.

Summer brought the best club lunches of all, when our mothers worked on their tans with one eye on their bridge hands and one on the kids splashing happily in the pool. On the patio where they sat at painted steel tables and did not open the umbrellas, it was usually well over a hundred degrees, the concrete impossible to walk on in bare feet, even wet ones. In a ten-by-ten-foot clapboard shed, the kid-beloved waiter named Brother scraped his griddle and sizzled his grease, and through a tiny screen door onto a narrow shelf he slid the world’s most perfect hamburgers, slapped flat and thin and hence well crisped, lavishly dressed with mustard, dill pickles, and onion. Brother’s onion rings were equally sublime. We also loved Mary, a sweet-tempered woman who sometimes substituted for the saucily impertinent Brother, but she just couldn’t get those onion rings right.

One day I saw a little girl, probably five years old, working up her nerve to jump into her father’s arms in the shallow end of the pool. “It’s all right,” he said, “don’t worry, I’ll catch you.” She drew herself up, half terrified, and plunged, all the way in. Her father swept her up, both of them laughing in the pure joy that only unconditional trust engenders. Would she carry the trust and confidence she learned that day through the rest of her life? I like to think so.

+

It was rumored that civil rights protesters were going to come to the Whitehaven Methodist Church. Some people said, Well, you know, all they do is come and sit in the back and then they leave, but many in the congregation were in a panic. Several members of the board wanted to put axe handles through the brass doorpulls. They themselves would stand just inside, with more axe handles, maybe with guns. My father calmed them down and talked them slowly through the ugly newspaper stories, the further interest in the church as a site for protest, and the scorn that such action would evoke. He did not need to ask what Jesus would have done. That question brooded silently in at least some of their consciences. No protesters ever showed up.

+

The other race I longed to understand, albeit also across a chasm, was the female. I really liked girls. Specific ones, of course, I craved, both in my heart and in my glands—my mind’s role little more than an offstage voice—and by the time I was sixteen one goal had subsumed all others in my life: I needed, I had, to get laid. The main problem was that in Whitehaven no one my age got laid (so I believed) except hoods and sluts. I made a weak attempt at one of the latter, sneaking her out on dates to barbecue joints and pizza parlors way across town where nobody else went. I convinced myself, more or less, of the okayness of her Woolworth’s perfume and her bleached strawstack hair, but she soon enough had my number, and repaid my ardor with contempt. I also had respectable girlfriends, with whom I would gladly have had carnal congress if I’d had a clue how and they’d have let me, both conditions as remote as the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

In the moments when my animal urges were sufficiently suppressed, I just plain liked these girls. They were nicer and smarter than boys, and more fun, and much more enjoyable to look at. None of them ever tried to hurt or humiliate me, as nearly every boy I’d ever known had at some point tried to do (examples: shot in butt by BB gun; scrotum nearly twisted off in locker room; “friend” sneaks up behind at urinal, grabs belt, shakes till I pee all over myself). The elaborate courtesy that reigned in my relations with girls had its roots in dancing school, where I had learned to bow and to ask for the honor of this dance and to hold them just close enough for us both to feel, oh, so sweetly, the heat of each other’s bodies, and to move together, together, as one two three, one two three, one; and now in its flowering, courtesy was more beautiful than I had ever imagined in its germinal days. And sure, it mitigated against my supreme goal, but supreme goals seemed in our world rarely to have been much on anybody’s mind. Wanting something out of reach was discouraged by every force at work in our social order.

My girlfriend in the fall of 1963 embodied niceness, prettiness, and propriety, although with an ironic sparkle in her blue eyes. Her hair was blond, her figure trim. She wore pearls and was always beautifully dressed. She had just moved from New Jersey, and her voice was more refined than that of the local girls. She was just right for me.

In Whitehaven’s system of social hierarchy a quiet change was taking place, and I was among its beneficiaries. By this age, at least in our high school society, one’s family’s position didn’t count for much; what had always carried sixteen-year-old boys to the upper levels of prestige were toughness, athleticism, taciturnity, and a readiness to fight. Faced with provocation, which didn’t take much, they beat the shit out of guys. They wore mirthless, often cruel smiles. Their ways with girls were rigidly ritualized: In season, the girls watched them on the playing field and cheered demurely (unless, as was often the case, the girls were cheerleaders, in which case they swiveled their hips lasciviously and yelled), and then the guys, freshly showered, hair wet, reeking of Old Spice cologne, would escort them in triumph to Leonard’s Bar-B-Q on the redneck South Side of Memphis. (Only a few years back, this ritual was likely to be broken at least once in the season by a fight behind the stands after the game, most often with South Side High School, the toughest, meanest bastards in city or county; but fighting, suddenly, even one-on-one, was now out of fashion.) At other times of year, the big guy, resplendent in his black letter jacket with the big gold W, would take his gal to one of the rococo movie palaces downtown, and then they’d go to Leonard’s.

Now, Leonard’s happens to have been the greatest pit-barbecue restaurant on the planet. The quality of the pork shoulder slowly roasted over logs of cured hickory was the foundation of its greatness. These were local country pigs, not too big, not too small, fed, I believe, on ambrosia, manna, pecans, and morning dew. The “pit” was actually a windowless concrete blockhouse with a single door that opened into smoky darkness. The golden meat was only faintly visible as the leathery old pitmaster turned the spits. I took my girlfriend to see it in action. We heard occasional hisses as drips of fat hit the coals. The pitmaster closed the door, shook out a Lucky, and regarded us with yellow eyes. He was so dark and sweat-slick he looked as if he himself had been smoked and slow-cooked for decades. “Sure smells good,” I said.

“It is good,” he replied.

“You been working here a long time?”

“Pretty long.”

“Well, we’re going to go inside and eat some of your barbecue.”

He turned away with a drag on his cigarette.

We went inside and took a table. I was wearing a tweed jacket, a button-down shirt, a carefully double-Windsor-knotted tie. My girlfriend wore a blue dress of some diaphanous material that swished and swirled as she walked. The football giants began to swagger in, with a nod to their few chosen non-athlete peers. Their girls’ hair was teased higher and sprayed tighter than that of the girls of the less-favored. The atmosphere was ecstatic, the athletes at the high point of their lives: Whitehaven, undefeated for the last two years, had tonight won the state football championship. And Leonard’s was the place for le tout Whitehaven High School to be.

Once in a while my friends deigned to sample places other schools went—the Pig ’n’ Whistle (private-school kids, sassy young black waiters, more hamburgers than barbecue despite the latter’s pretty high quality; though also sensational onion rings); Coletta’s Pizza (barbecue pizza a popular option, or half barbecue and half pepperoni); night clubs (foodless) that required fake IDs and hip flasks and more nerve than most of us had—but Leonard’s, for kids from Whitehaven, was very heaven. You could be served in your car, with a tray clipped on outside and the heavy smoke from the pit soaking into your sweater and your pores, which was fun sometimes; you could go up and down and visit with your pals through their own car windows, see who was out with whom. But the scene, the lekking ground, with silver dollars embedded in the foyer floor and hormones thick as river air, was here inside.

My favorite waitress, a red-headed crane of a woman with a smoker’s rasp, presented herself with pencil poised over pad. There were a great many things on the menu—barbecued baloney, barbecued Polish sausage, beef barbecue, wonderful ribs, fried catfish with hushpuppies--but if you were a couple from Whitehaven on a date, you ordered a Mr. Pig sandwich, a bean pot, and a Coke. You could try that other stuff with your parents.

You could have your barbecue white, that is, entirely from the inside of the slow-smoked shoulder; or brown, including lots of crunchily caramelized outside; or mixed, which girls, ever eager to please or at least not to displease, often chose. The pork was succulent, just fatty enough, chopped, not pulled, topped with yellow, small-grained cole slaw and a slather of Leonard’s sublime sweet sauce. The buns were just buns. More sweet sauce and a fiery hot one, in a short, unlabeled pharmaceutical bottle, sat on each table. The bean pot, too hot to touch, bean-slop burned to its sides, came on a plate of its own with a little paper cup of the same cole slaw. Custom required that one dump out the slaw and pour the beans on top of it, so that there was a cool bright center to be worked toward through the spicy, glutinous, brick-red beans. Everything was soft and sweet and spicy.

Those were the tastes of our kisses. Whitehaven, ever expanding, always had plenty of dead-end unpaved roads which in a year or two would be lined with houses and asphalted. Some spots were so popular that groups of cars would gather there, each containing a couple hungrily making out, sometimes two couples. I chose to be alone with my girlfriend, kissing and groping and sweating and rock-hard and, finally, gently, pushed away.

And there, at length, our romance ran aground. Every guy I knew was getting somewhere—to first base (touching a breast), or second (below), or even better. Some, for all I knew, might have been going all the way (our code held that no one brag, even speak, of a such a thing). My lovely girlfriend, a pious Catholic, would kiss for hours, but that was it. I was too hungry for her, and she was too buttoned-up for me. I never did like her as much as I thought I should.

What was more, the field was wide-open. It no longer seemed impossible for me to ask the prettiest girls out, or the even cooler few who were becoming sexy as well. It would be years until I understood, but I know now that since the assassination of President Kennedy there had been a storm gathering, and of it such changes were the first soft breezes and distant summer lightning. As if overnight, the jocks and other tough guys were no longer at the top. It was okay—it was admired!—to make good grades. I was not what came later to be known as a nerd, though I did have my nerdy qualities. I was small of stature, studious, bespectacled, decidedly non-tough. Worse, I had a growing tendency to use big words and talk about poetry. But I was certainly no romantic hero, and I had never beaten the shit out of anybody. I had my own column in the Broadcaster, the school newspaper. It was printed at the Whitehaven Press, both a printing business and our community’s weekly newspaper, which Towery’s parents owned. There I met real newspaper people, affectionately cynical and, in the context, worldly. The photographer, once a jazz musician, still smoked marijuana and never stopped talking. I loved the clatter of the old typesetting machine under the swift fingers of the Dickensian old rogue Mr. Henry (I still don’t know if that was his first or last name). I can still smell those innocent poisons, the melting lead and the letterpress ink. Just behind was the Lottaburger stand: Both the building and the counter within were perfect circles. The inimitable Lottaburger itself was huge, grease-soaked, piled high with condiments, superb in every way. A large simulacrum of it twirled slowly atop a pole on the roof.

I was the number-two editor of the Broadcaster. At the Tennessee High School Press Association’s convention in Chattanooga, I ran for the vice presidency. I seem to have had sort of a thing for second place. Anyhow, I did win.

There was also, that spring, the election of the president of the Whitehaven High School senior class for the coming year. At the leading edge of postwar baby boom, the Class of 1965 was the biggest the school had ever had—over five hundred. The two guys nominated were both of the brainy, four-eyed sort who had been grit under the wheels of the football great no more than three years before. I lost.

It was the spring of the Beatles. Most of my pals were letting their hair grow. This was worse even than Elvis! My father and every other father in my ken, not to mention most of the guys in our newly deposed jock class, all regarded the Beatles and even the Rolling Stones as decidedly effeminate. This was not what Winners were supposed to look like—but in early April 1964, all five of the top five singles on the pop charts were Beatles songs.

From my pal Richard Dickson’s column in the Broadcaster:

Tommy McNamee (it seems like I’ve always got something to say about him) has gone berserk. Nothing new, you say? Well, it’s been coming all along….He has a truth movement. He makes little signs for everything. He really went wild at the library last week. Simple things like a sign that reads “chair” on a chair and “magazine” on a magazine weren’t too disturbing. But under a modern art painting “modern art thing”! That’s pretty gross. He also had a sign on the wall that read “sign.” On the librarian’s back (much to her discomfort) was a sign that read “librarian person.” He challenges the school to spread truths....

Like those shaggy, faggy rock-and-rollers, I was a Winner. I had talked my teachers out of having to do homework. “If I can make over 95 on the six-weeks test without it,” I argued, “what’s wrong with that?” And they said Okay, and I made those 95s, and better, often 100s. Whitehaven wasn’t a very hard school. It was just the right smallness of pond for me to feel like a mighty big fish in.

Late that spring I fell in, fell in love, in fact, with another blue-eyed blonde, who was not only nice, smart, smart-alecky, graceful, and unbelievably good-looking but—at the same time—sexy. She always wore her hair down and loose, and knew well how to let it fall over one eye and then with a lift of her chin swing it back. She didn’t have the little short-stepping twittery walk that the other girls had; she had long legs, she swung them long, she pulled her shoulders back, which pushed her breasts up and forward, there was full-bodied freedom in her walk. Watching her coming down the hall toward me, swinging her hips and smiling, I couldn’t believe my luck.

One thing that probably didn’t hurt was my mother’s car, a sky-blue 1961 Chevrolet Impala convertible with the big, 327-cubic-inch V-8 and a four-barrel carburetor that roared like a hurricane when I had sneakily removed the air filter. I had always loved cars, but cars this cool existed in another realm—magazines—out of reach, beyond the farthest horizon. The notion of a girlfriend like this was equally unimaginable. Yet here I was with both.

Out at road’s end in the Chevy with the top down and the moon above, she returned my passion in almost equal measure. But there was never enough time. All good girls, even my not-altogether-good girlfriend, had to be home by midnight. I did not like taking her home, nor, for that matter, picking her up. She lived in a crummy neighborhood in a crummy little house with a fat, bad-tempered mother and a seldom-seen country boy of a father, who worked on the railroad and drank.

Then came summer. I was working part-time at the Whitehaven Public Library, and loving the long literary conversations I had with the remarkable old ladies who were the full-time librarians. It was always quiet. It wasn’t much of a town for reading. Half an hour could pass without the door opening. I also had long days of freedom, to plow through the stacks of books I brought home or, much better, to roam the earth with my girlfriend. We roasted on the imported-sand beach of Sardis Reservoir, an hour down into Mississippi, and as night fell we grappled in the Chevy, our hot skin peeling stickily away from the hot naugahyde, coming closer and closer, I believed, to the possibility of the real thing. Once, we swam a long way across to the colored beach, where we were greeted with silence and stares. Back where we belonged, we walked along the sand holding hands, my girlfriend in a delectably reckless bikini. She swung her long hair back and kissed me in front of the world.

The world: our little, little world. Once in a while, especially with the help of the librarians, I could not help seeing out, to the great world beyond the limits of my understanding. On June 21, 1964, the Ku Klux Klan murdered three civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, in Mississippi. On July 2, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Two weeks later, Harlem rioted. On August 7, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving the president essentially unlimited power to repel North Vietnamese attacks on American armed forces. On August 28, Bob Dylan introduced the Beatles to marijuana. On September 1, I asked my blonde and beautiful girlfriend to join me for a round of fun on the Labor Day weekend, including a summer’s-end trip to the beach at Sardis—and maybe, at last——

She said she couldn’t go. She had a date with my best friend. He came over later that day and said he’d been seeing her all summer. There was something I didn’t like about the way he said “seeing.”

“You’ve—made love to her?” I demanded.

Yes.

“All summer long you’ve been fucking her behind my back?”

Yes.

He let me slug him, hard. My time of triumph was over.

I shut myself in the bathroom and poached myself in the bathtub for hours, sobbing. My parents called through the door, begging me to come out and tell them what was wrong. They couldn’t get in, because I had pulled out a drawer that blocked the door. Finally I said I would come out if I didn’t have to tell them what was wrong. They asked me if I wanted to go to a psychiatrist. Sobbing again, I said yes. I told the psychiatrist I would tell him what had happened as long as he promised not to tell my parents. He told me I should tell them myself. I said no, and neither could he. All right, he said, and I told him. He told me it was normal for me to feel that way. I was fine.

My best friend went out with that girl for the next six years, into college and after. Then he married her. That lasted six months. With one of his best friends she ran off to Texas.

CHAPTER FIVE: SCOUTING: 1960

(The fifth chapter of my memoir.)

I’ve always liked the Twelve Points of the Boy Scout Law, because they have all always applied to me in perfect descending order, from the truly true at the top to the, oh, um, well, something else? as they approach the bottom. A scout is

· trustworthy (“People can depend on him,” says the Boy
Scout Handbook—yep);

· loyal (to a fault);

· helpful (see below);

· friendly (risk-averse);

· courteous (because my mother would have killed me if I hadn’t been, and her ghost keeps a gimlet eye on me to this day);

· kind (“does not harm or kill any living thing”—in this I grossly failed, as a ruthless BB-gunner of songbirds, to kill which was a crime, especially if you shot a mockingbird, the Tennessee state bird, which I found especially easy to hit);

· obedient (here I really begin to slide);

· cheerful (once in a while);

· thrifty (still doesn’t know the meaning of the word);

· brave (“can face danger although he is afraid”—no, runs like hell);

· clean (“keeps his body and mind fit and clean”—well, body yes) ;

· reverent (ha!).

My first cooking was as a Boy Scout: a coffee can into which I piled hamburger meat, onions, and potatoes and which I then buried in the coals of our campfire. An hour later, voilà! When I uncapped it, everything was simultaneously burned and raw. Pretty much everybody’s was the same, and we all choked it down.

By now I had learned to detest the food at school—not only Buzzy Michael’s worm-riddled blackeyed peas but tuna sandwiches so wet the bread clung to the roof of your mouth, summer squash swimming in slack water, rice under pale, congealing gravy, slimy okra, slimy spinach, slimy canned asparagus, slimy canned potatoes, cold hot dogs on clammy cold buns, baked spaghetti under a glazed-hard roof of melted cheese, baked chicken so dry it sucked up all the spit in your mouth, and the worst of the worst, salmon croquettes you could have smelled from Arkansas. Compared to school food and scout food, my mother’s cooking didn’t seem so bad.

She tried hard. Each of the four of us got a different breakfast: my father, eggs, bacon, coffee with cream (real) and sugar; Janie, cinnamon toast or some other sweet thing; my mother, dry toast, four cups of acrid black coffee from an ancient, battered aluminum percolator, and several cigarettes; me, o.j. (frozen), chocolate milk, and a grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And until I got to seventh grade or so and discovered that bringing your lunch was hopelessly uncool, at least a couple of days a week my mother would pack my little gray steel lunchbox tidily with good tuna sandwiches (sweet with Miracle Whip) or American cheese ones, or ham, the bread always white, wrapped in crisp wax paper; a little bag of potato chips; a pickle; a piece of fruit and a cookie. Red-plaid thermos of milk. Hard to beat—happy food.

Scouting was happy too. We worshiped our scoutmaster, the square-jawed American Airlines pilot “Pappy” Conner, and we eagerly took up the discipline he imposed on us (lining up, marching, clean camp, silence in meetings). Pappy could do anything in the woods, and was infinitely kind. I loved getting my merit badges: making just-so fires, tracking animals and making plaster-of-Paris casts of their footprints, learning the bandages and splints of first aid, memorizing the Bill of Rights (for Citizenship), signaling by Morse code and semaphor, and, soon to be momentous, lifesaving

Boy Scout camp, on the other hand, in the Ozarks of northwestern Arkansas, was bad. Pappy wasn’t there, the counselors were sadists, the outhouse wasps buzzed so mercilessly between one’s bare ass and the unspeakable heap below that some of us were admitted to the infirmary suffering from advanced constipation. Once a grunting brute of a counselor, under the guise of teaching me the cross-chest carry for rescuing someone drowning—required for the Lifesaving merit badge—grabbed me, hard, telling me that drowning people were likely to do that, and sank me, and held me there till I began to drown and he let go. I swam to shore, choking, as he laughed.

But there was also canoeing on the icy, clear South Fork of the Spring River, high boy-voices singing Dip, dip, and swing them back, flashing like silver, swift as the wild goose flies.

+

Corpses of frogs, fish, snakes, and crawdads were ranged along my bedroom bookshelves in jars of denatured alcohol. Then my wild bachelor uncle from the Delta, to my mother's horror, gave me a BB gun. No songbird was safe. The first shot usually only knocked it senseless from its perch, and I would seek it out in the brush to administer the coup de grce to the brain. I made no pretense of collecting them; I left my victims where they lay. My favorite target was the mockingbird, the Tennessee state bird, illegal to kill. What could have possessed me? Remembering this makes my throat clench with shame.

The pursuit of Eagle Scouthood led me to gentler concerns. To take casts of animal tracks for my nature merit badge, I traveled deeper into the old forest than I had ever gone. There were mysteries at every step. Why did the mother raccoon and her family stop here? What made the heron take flight? Fox prints at the edge of the water: did the fox swim, or leap? Hence, slowly, my rage to possess wild creatures was displaced by empathy.

In a little pasture far back in the woods I found a dead calf. The head was twisted half around, the eyes staring into the sky. The skin was peeled back from the rib cage, which was crawling with flies. One leg had been eaten down to the bone. The day was hot, but the flesh had not yet begun to stink, so the kill must have been very recent, and the predator nearby. Crows called. A sharp hind edge of cloudshade swept across the grass, and in the sudden brightness there was a clarity that I had never seen before, as if a veil had been lifted from the face of the world.

I looked for tracks, found one, and took its cast. It was big, three inches across. My field guide said, unbelievably, cougar! Mountain lion! Panther.

Not until years later, when the cast was long lost, did I realize what a find that may have been. Felis concolor is extinct now in the Mississippi valley. Indeed the cougar may be gone everywhere east of the Rockies, except for the minuscule and dwindling population of the Florida panther subspecies. Could this have been one of the last Eastern cougars? Or was it, as a wildlife biologist suggested to me recently, the hybrid of a calf‑killing dog and a boy's eager imagination?

The old-growth forest was cut down, and not even for lumber: the great trees were bulldozed into piles and burned. Most of the topsoil washed away, and the red clay beneath it required laborious cultivation to sustain the newly unrolled swaths of zoysia and Bermuda grass sod. Saplings were planted, and wired upright. The lakes were drained, and the black people moved out. The last hobo known to have visited Whitehaven was found dead beneath a hedge. We got a shopping center, and an interstate highway. Fluoridation of our drinking water was fought, thought to be a Communist plot to curb the birth rate. I had my first summer job as a carpenter's helper, putting up drywall in new houses.

Improved pesticides came onto the market, and it was possible now to drive through the Delta bottoms with no more than an occasional sweep of the windshield wipers. My wild uncle, who kept bongos and a conga drum in his den closet, got married. The ospreys disappeared from the cypresstop nests, the alligators from the bayous. The only lake left was appropriated by tough teenagers as a beer‑drinking hideout; they raped a girl there. Quails no longer shuffled in the leaves on the lawn.

What had been done to Nonconnah Creek was done now to its tributaries. New sewers leaked into the stagnant trench that was all that remained of my creek's headwaters. Our grapevine‑draped swimming hole and the alligator snapping turtle's riffle lasted longer, but we could get there on bicycles now, on smooth blacktop. Often we didn't make it that far, having stopped off to chew gum and laugh in some girl’s yard and lost track of time. When the last of my creek was ditched out, I believe I did not notice.

+

Thanks to my Boy Scout training—and my mother’s determined character—I saved a man’s life. From the front page of the Memphis Press-Scimitar of June 16, 1960:

SCOUT TOMMY McNAMEE, ONLY 13, SAVES MAN:
Mouth-to-Mouth Respiration Until Firemen Arrive

One of the things 13-year-old Tommy McNamee likes most about Scouting is first aid.

The thing he likes most about first aid is studying about artificial respiration.

Tommy and other members of Boy Scout Troop 30 of Whitehaven Methodist Church decided last year to enroll in a Red Cross class in first aid. They learned how to apply mouth-to-mouth respiration.

The training helped Tommy to save a man’s life in Hot Springs, Ark., yesterday.

The man is Otho Cooper, 54, of Philadelphia, Miss., who was vacationing in Hot Springs. He fell into a swimming pool after an apparent blackout, was pulled out of the pool by some swimmers and then revived by Tommy, who gave him mouth-to-mouth respiration for about four minutes until firemen arrived to help.

Cooper went to a Hot Springs hospital, where doctors gave Tommy credit for saving his life.

Tommy, a First Class Scout, is the son of Mr. and Mrs. C. T. McNamee of 1391 Oakwood Drive.

Tommy was in Hot Springs because his father was on an insurance convention.

Tommy seems certain of winning some honors. The Advancement Committee of the Chickasaw Council of the Boy Scouts will send a review of his heroism to the National Court of Honor, Boy Scouts of America.

Well, what the newspaper neglected to mention was that I would never have gone near Otho Cooper if my mother hadn’t been hissing in my ear the whole time, “Tommy, go, you’ve got to help him, those people are killing him.” Some people were trying to give him the old push-on-the-chest-and-flap-the-elbows style of artificial respiration, to no avail. “He’s got his Lifesaving Merit Badge!” my mother proclaimed, shoving me forward through the crowd of gawkers. Lying inert in his puddle, Otho Cooper was to all appearances already dead, his body white as paper, his face purple as a muscadine grape. My mother chased off the hapless artificial-respirators. I lifted Otho Cooper’s head into the proper throat-clearing position, and then dropped his head, hard, on the concrete. The sound it made was precisely my idea of how the cracking of a skull would sound. I was certain that if he wasn’t already dead, I had now killed him. “Hurry, Tommy,” whispered my mother, urgently. Suppressing a gag, I put my mouth over his. He was surely not fifty-four but a hundred years old. He had not shaved for a couple of days, and his fat purple tongue seemed to have bristles, too. I pinched his nose shut and blew, and nothing happened. “Harder,” said my mother. I blew, and he bubbled faintly way down inside. Blow, bubble, blow, gurgle, blow, choke, and so on for what seemed a very long while, until suddenly Otho Cooper erupted, a great gush of water and then a geyser of vomit. And at last a mucus-choked gasp, and another.

The swimming pool was cut into the side of the mountain and could be reached only through an upper floor of the Arlington Hotel, so the firemen were having to hack their way through the rock-strewn woods to open a way in for their truck, without which their respirator didn’t work. Finally they broke through, and Otho Cooper, now mechanically inflated and deflated, hazily returned to the land of the living.

Several weeks later, I received a package from Otho Cooper, Philadelphia, Mississippi. Inside it was my reward—a wallet—and in the wallet was…twenty bucks? a hundred? No, not a God-damned thing.

+

In July of 1960, several dozen of my sweltering fellow merit-badge-earners and I—including my bosom pal Towery—rode buses to join fifty-six-thousand-odd others on the arid plains below Pike’s Peak, near Colorado Springs, in celebration of the fiftieth birthday of the Boy Scouts of America. The official account of the Jamboree, as it was called, reminds me that “We did our own cooking—breakfast, lunch, and supper—the whole thing. It wasn’t the Waldorf, but it was good. One night we cooked 25,741 pounds of steak.” We also consumed “9,895 cases of breakfast food, 2,525 cases of canned fruit, 5,567 cases of canned vegetables, 2,607 cases of canned meat, 21,250 pounds of ground beef, 577,960 quarts of milk, 43,980 quarts of fresh orange juice, 132,330 loaves of bread, 10,224 pies, 46,342 heads of lettuce, 45,200 peaches, 77,400 bananas.” Hey, and we saw cue-ball-pated President Dwight D. Eisenhower standing waving from his Lincoln convertible, and Sheriff Matt Dillon from TV, and I ate bear meat and was bitten by a horned toad. At night, beneath the blazing Milky Way—far brighter here in the Rockies than ever in humidity-shrouded Memphis—we lay on our backs listened to our genius of a Senior Patrol Leader tell us the great Greek stories of the constellations. Best of all, we saw, hanging between the back legs of Boys’ Life magazine’s official mascot, a burro (well-)named Pedro, the biggest penis in the world.

+

In fifth grade I had been president of the He Man Woman Haters Club. By seventh, I had secret girlfriends and soul-deep longings, for which no slightest passage of information from my parents or anybody else had prepared me. My friends and I were in fact remarkably free, in large part thanks to our parents’ ignorance of us. They mistrusted all forms of personal insight. They had inherited emotional distance as a way of being. War, poverty, deracination, and the mysterious, not yet named epidemic of emotional depression that was spreading through American society combined in an all-darkening pall of unconsciousness. History—Indian genocide, slavery, frontier violence and crime, Jim Crow—was a presence not to be known too intimately. Generations of denial had eventuated in a culture of indifference, a shutdown of emotional intelligence, an inexpressible need not to know. Passion was certainly not to be trusted. Teenagers in Paris kissed on bridges as adults flowed smiling past; Whitehaven’s teenagers were confined to furtive grappling at the ends of gravel roads. Mistrust was effectively mitigated in one place: church. You could trust Jesus. You could trust the minister. You could trust your brethren of the congregation. Hence the immitigable shock when one of the pillars of Whitehaven, good Christian man, commissioner of county roads, confessed to taking thousands of dollars in kickbacks from contractors and went to prison.

Once in a while, a grownup would have a “nervous breakdown,” a girl would get pregnant, a boy would hear voices. They disappeared.

The general unconsciousness obscured dangers great and small, and redounded to freedom for us kids. There were no seat belts in our cars, we played baseball, not softball, we played tackle football, unsupervised, not touch. The notion of putting on a helmet to ride your bicycle was risible. We didn’t have play dates; we just went outside, found one another, and played. We rode our bikes to moon around at pretty girls’ houses, and, I’m not quite sure why except maybe on our shared general principle of keeping our distance, we lied to our parents about where we’d been. The swamps and forests of our adventures were seriously wild places, nearly wilderness, stretching for miles, and in them lurked an abundance of ticks, chiggers, highly aggressive wasps of many species, copperheads, water moccasins, rattlesnakes. We smoked the stalks of some weed with a pithy, porous center, doing God knows what to our lungs. We nailed two-by-fours to the great columnar trunks of tulip-trees and climbed them to inconceivable heights. Our creek’s water was infested with worms, flagellates, amoebae, and other dire parasites. We went fishing and hooked ourselves through the thumb and learned to push the barb on through to be clipped by somebody’s rusty needlenose pliers, and never to cry in the process. As long as I was home and presentable and seated at the dinner table by six o’clock, my father was content. If I was five minutes late, he gravely, sadly slipped off his belt, took me outside, and strapped me hard on the butt. I am punctual to this day.

There was a good deal of violence in our world, little of it condemned in any quarter. When you broke a rule at school, you got licks with a stout wooden paddle, sometimes wielded by a teacher, sometimes, more painfully, by the principal. White people’s dogs bit colored people. Our eggs were delivered sometimes by a white man, sometimes by a colored man, and our dogs knew which was which when the station wagon the egg men shared turned into the driveway: They ignored the white man and barked in fury at the colored one. Boys got in fights at school, in people’s back yards, behind a church, and other boys gathered to cheer them on; no one intervened unless the match was severely imbalanced. Bad older boys—hoods—fought gangs from enemy high schools late at night in obscure industrial parking lots, and it was widely believed, and perhaps true, that sometimes they fought with chains or knives. Bullying was rampant from third grade up, and almost never attended to except by informal peer coalitions formed for justice or vengeance, whose only means of retribution was violence.

Violence was often the means of enforcing discipline at school. On January 8, 1962, I wrote an anonymous letter to the principal decrying the acts of an enraged phys ed coach who had paddled every member of his class, including me, when none of us would (or, in my case, could) identify a kid whose fooling around with the water fountain in the gym lobby had resulted in a puddle on the concrete floor. He hit us really hard, too. And then began again, one brutal wham each on the butt. When the bell rang, he bellowed, “This will start again tomorrow!” I didn’t dare send the letter, of course. The principal would probably have paddled me too.

+

The quarter-square-mile block on which we lived—“nice” houses on three sides, grand ones on the fourth—was home to thirteen boys exactly the same age, and one girl. Within easy walking or biking distance were a dozen more guys. We were a society unto ourselves, unevenly democratic, with constantly shifting alliances, grudges, hierarchy. We rode our bikes to school together in good weather, a relative term in that climate. In bad—which meant really bad: downpours, freezing rain, snow, temperature below twenty-five (the concept of “too hot” was unknown)—our mothers carpooled. We chose up sides for baseball, basketball, football, and red rover. I, small and unaggressive, was often the last to be chosen. My doing better in school than any of the rest of them counted for nothing. Dominance was this society’s only currency.

My father threw a baseball at me, hard. It glanced off my gloved fingertip, which burned with pain. “Just pick it up and throw it,” he scolded as I failed to keep tears in. I threw. “You throw like a damn girl,” he said, disgusted. He insisted I sign up for Peewee League anyhow. I played right field, couldn’t catch anything, struck out over and over.

We wandered the world freely. Bobby Towery and I would ride the bus to downtown Memphis and gorge ourselves on minuscule Krystal hamburgers, square, thin, a nickel apiece, delicious. We’d take ourselves to a movie. We roamed the army-surplus store admiring the hand grenades, machine-gun tripods, camouflage pup tents, padded helmets; we bought canvas-covered canteens, folding shovels, a bayonet, hatchets with which we slew young trees. We had been hearing lately of jungle warfare, and in the swamp we played at it, sweating.

We were still children, ahistorical, culturally isolated, and just beginning to feel, though not yet to recognize, the faint rumble, as from deep in the earth, of the real war, the prodigious violence, the hatred, the catastrophes that were soon to envelop us.