Prime Green : Remembering the Sixties Read online

  there was what seemed to be an arbitrary speedup, announced by the sounding of a siren. There was half an hour for lunch plus a break in midmorning and another in midafternoon. Breaks consisted of ten minutes at a plywood table in a green-and-yellow room, mainly to let people have a smoke, forbidden on the line. The break room was also equipped with coin machines that contained things that could be swallowed. After being banished by the Janus-faced pairing in the booth, I found the second assembly-line job under circumstances essentially identical. My dismissal, by an undead foreman, was less polite. The cashier presented me with a pink slip and a work schedule for the following week. My schedule said: “Terminated.” There were boxes as on a speeding ticket and two were neatly checked in. One check keyed the word “Attitude.” The other indicated “No incident of theft of material property or cash prior to termination.” Since the last line on the document told me I might submit the thing to prospective future employers, I understood that it was a qualified recommendation. “I never said a word to anybody,” I told the cashier. “Y’all come back,” the cashier said. Waiting for the bus downtown, I thought vengefully about the bright future when the unions would arrive to organize the plant. Time would change things and would bring all kinds of social justice to America, North and South. It felt “inevitable.” In those days the word had connotations beyond death, famine, pestilence, and war. I passed through a number of off-the-books, cash-only positions. The next recorded employment I found was in the service of Collier’s Encyclopedias, a set of thick, handsomely bound volumes I suppose was as useful as any other. Each morning the Collier’s chief salesper- son picked us up at a designated meet and drove us to one of the 48 robert stone

  towns within an hour or two of New Orleans. A town in St. Tam- many or Washington Parish would be likely, Covington or Bogalusa, or we might work across the state line in Pearl River County, Mis- sissippi. There were difficulties. Many of the towns had ordinances that outlawed door-to-door selling. Voter-registration drives were in action all over the South. In many towns northern volunteers had come to the deepest South for the first time, assisting local initia- tives that were sometimes creating an African American con- stituency where none had existed since Reconstruction. I was there and I did nothing to help. I have always liked to believe—I do believe—that my first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, was a modest shot from the right side. It was literally the best I could do though it didn’t require the heroism of a Viola Liuzzo or a Mickey Schwerner. Ironically, the self-serving career that led me to it landed me, though very, very briefly, in jail. One night just after sunset we were working the poorer white quarter of a burg on the Mississippi side. By then I had found that the Mississippi Gulf Coast had some things in common with New Orleans. Most obvious was a degree of ethnic diversity that eased the pressure of what W. J. Cash called the “proto-Dorian bond,” the ob- sessive pursuit of white supremacy as a form of religion that tor- mented the dreams and threatened the lives of so many. The Greeks of Pass Christian, the Croatians of Biloxi, had inherited a few ethnic concerns that went back beyond institutionalized memories of the Confederacy. But the Mississippi town we were selling in that eve- ning was not on the coast; it was far enough north in the state for the sultry wind to carry the scent of pine and tupelo and to encounter mule-drawn wagons on the shoulder of the dirt roads. The town had been famous for the rough turp camps where Huddie Ledbetter had worked between jolts, and it contained the headquarters of an inter- prime green: remembering the sixties 49

  national logging company that took longleaf pine. The land was flat but there were sizable Indian mounds around town, some with houses built over them, approachable by wooden steps. The Collier’s pitch was to be memorized and seemed unchanging as the canon of the Mass. Twenty-five years later, visiting in a Hous- ton suburb, I watched a youth the age I had been recite the same in- cantations. These, being interpreted, went more or less like this: “Good evening, sir” (and you look the good ole boy straight in the eye; if he’s not home, move on, you don’t pitch Mama): “Lucky sir! Your ideal household has been selected for a marketing experiment which will afford you big savings. We propose to place a set of ency- clopedias in your home. You may not know this but your neighbors look up to you and model their lives on yours. If you take in our en- cyclopedias at an absurdly low price your neighbors will see and— you know how it is? When the right people have got something fine everybody else wants it too, am I right?” (Here exchange knowing looks and melancholy smiles at the simplicity and pathetic pre- dictability of human nature. If no reaction is forthcoming on his part, give him the look and the smile.) “Only thing is heh heh” (in- vitation to join in cynical laughter) “they’ll be paying five hundred times what you done paid with your extended EZ payment discount price. Sound good to you? The kids will bless you for it. They’ll ex- cel, yessir!” And et cetera. First door I hit was opened by a sharp-eyed man with a little brush mustache. Was that a gun in his hand? Yes it was, by God. Some kind of revolver. He put it back in a shaving kit he was hold- ing. At some point in the pitch I asked, jovially, if the revolver was loaded. He looked at me in mild disgust. “Gun wouldn’t do you no good wasn’t loaded, now would it?” 50 robert stone

  “Ha ha,” I replied. (A good jest, Montressor.) At one point he offered me what he called a coldrink. I accepted. He went back into the kitchen and I heard him preparing it. He spoke to someone. I heard a child’s voice, the child whose future would shine with the wisdom of Daddy’s Yankee encyclopedia. “You get to goddamn hell something something!” shouted ole Dad, quite angrily. The man told me he was a long-distance bus driver. He said he drove eighteen-wheelers too but I didn’t believe that part. He began to ask me depressingly dumb questions. He asked me if there was anything in the encyclopedia about evolution or the mixing of the races. I assured him there wasn’t. It wasn’t my finest hour. I was des- perate for a paycheck. He signed up. He seemed a little angry. We walked outside and he turned on his front door light. His house was on top of one of the Indian mounds with wooden steps leading up to the door. “You say you sure nothin’ in it about evolution or the mixing of the races?” “That’s right,” I said. He had signed the goddamn thing. I was heartily tired of my own song and dance. “Better not be.” A million gnats, moths, and mosquitoes spun around the lighted tin carriage lamp beside his front door. One after another little insects singed their wings against its flyspecked glass casing and fell into the ruined spiderweb at its base. The light was dazzling me. But when I turned away there was still light in my eyes. The wooden steps were steep and the rail beside them was flimsy. I had my hand in front of my face and I realized that there was light in front of me and below. Some- one was shining a power torch beam into my eyes. A voice heard only in dreams (or bad movies) said, “Come down them steps real slow.” prime green: remembering the sixties 51

  It was the sheriff. Through the shafts of light I could make out the star-shaped badge on his work shirt. He had a Stetson and stitched cowboy boots; he was leaning one foot forward on the wooden steps. He had a gut over his gunbelt and a holstered pistol. I was being arrested. They rounded up the whole team, which included quite a few nonsoutherners, and took us to jail. There we remained until a local lawyer was retained by Collier’s to spring us. Over coffee with the deputies we learned that the Yankee inflections were what had brought the sheriff. Townfolk, including the eighteen-wheeler jock wannabe, were afraid that history had come for them in the form of outside agitators. Not quite, but it was coming. A couple of weeks after I was liberated from my Mississippi im- prisonment I saw a strange sign on the wall of a Royal Street coffee shop. It was printed in a kind of liturgical script with a cross and what looked like upraised spears. The largest drawn figure was of a metal chalice, and the title of the production was The Cup. There was what appeared to be a photograph of Jesus Christ in the middle of the sign. Closer inspection revealed it to be the photo of an actor in costume, a melancholy long-faced man with an actorish name who according t
o the sign portrayed “the Christus.” The sign was solicit- ing apprentice actors for roles in a traveling Passion play, which the sign said was “North America’s most reverent and moving com- memoration of Our Lord’s sacrifice.” It seemed to move from town to town, sponsored by local churches. I wrote the telephone number down, along with the particulars of the next few performances. I didn’t know what was on my mind; at seventy-five cents and a dollar fifty, the tickets were in excess of our entertainment budget. At that time we were surviving through our discovery of an old New Orleans amenity, the friendly beanery waitress. The friendly beanery 52 robert stone

  waitress could slip you a slice of white bread and redeye gravy to keep you whole until the next opportunity came to borrow a quar- ter. Public assistance was not available. I mentioned the odd joint to Janice, who politely told me she didn’t think she’d like to go. Then I called the number of the opera- tion and pretended to be an applicant for a role in the reverent com- memoration. Anyway, I thought of myself as pretending. The show’s local operation was in a small suite of rooms at a shabby, barely respectable hotel on Canal Street. The hall door was opened by a tall, slender woman with long silky hair. She had the unsound blue eyes of an Ibsen leading lady magnified by wire-framed glasses. Gor- geous was the word for her. Hers had been the voice that responded to my telephone call. I later learned that she was one of the Christus’s two lovely daughters. In fact, I never got to see the other one, but of her comeliness I have no doubt. The sisters had various clerical and organizational duties with the group. They also performed onstage, bits like Pilate’s wife and the serving girl who denounces Peter. The man himself, the Christus, was pale and fine featured, with a high forehead and a bald dome. The fringe around his skull made him look tonsured. He wore very darkly colored aviator sunglasses and a black lightweight suit. His voice was cultivated and, in- evitably, somewhat affected. His name, as I had noticed, was un- likely and resonant. All at once I recognized it as the name of a radio actor on one or another of the radio dramas I’d listened to. “Attitude,” he told me, “is the key. People feel as though they’re at a church service. They’re open and worshipful. Sensitive. They may not identify a bad attitude but they are aware of it. Something will trouble them.” I nodded thoughtfully.Was attitude catching up with me again?As a youth, I was as innocently bad attituded as I could get away with. prime green: remembering the sixties 53

  “You cannot disdain the story. You cannot disdain your character. Of course you can’t despise the audience.” The audience, he told me, would consist of small-town folks all over North America, and the outfit was called the International Gospel Theatre (sic). It worked its way like a wheat-harvesting com- bine, rolling up from the Texas plains to the edge of the muskeg in northern Manitoba. The character I would compete to portray was the Chief Temple Guard, although I would have to learn several parts. As CTG I would command a corps of teenage Bible school students, always lo- cally recruited, who would serve as Herodian spear carriers. It was also the Guards’ responsibility to put up and break the sets under the supervision of their Chief. The audiences, the Christus informed me, were unlikely to have seen a live show before unless it was perhaps a previous year’s perfor- mance by the International Gospel Theatre. He said his group had been offered good money to perform on tape. But the Christus be- lieved in live performance. It was the only way to bring out the sacramental quality of a Passion play. Did I grasp this? I said I did but he told me anyway, about the Thirty Years’ War and the plague and the burghers of Oberammergau. I had always mixed up the town with the half-timbered village that hired the Pied Piper. He had me do some readings from the King James Bible. Job and Eccle- siastes. Revelation. I asked him if I would have to read such stuff on the road. He said he liked my readings. He said from time to time we would open the show with a little scripture. I saw the comely daughter who took phone calls looking at me. She had listened to me wailing on the Seven Seals and the Beast from the Sea and so on. The Christus noticed me returning her look. “You have folks?” he asked. “Married?” 54 robert stone

  “No,” I heard myself say. “Not me.” “Yeah, well,” he said, “it’s no spot for a family man.” The last thing I could endure to be at that moment was a fam- ily man. The Christus said he thought well of my work and might decide to hire me. He had a few other men to hear. For some it was just a courtesy; they were past it. “So you want to play Chief of Temple Guards!” he said. He had the kind of smile called vulpine. In his pictures with a Jesus wig, he looked like Rasputin. He told me to check back in person at the end of the day. I thought of going home to the Quarter but I didn’t want to see J. I was contemplating an unspeakable treachery. Or at least I thought I was. I went to the public library on Federal Square, where it was cool, and read the city histories. There was an entire room filled with genealogy. I settled down in Fiction and read all of The Plumed Serpent. I admired Lawrence very much then. From time to time the bottom fell out under my stomach when I remembered what I was contemplating and I said, “Oh, God.” Which was enough to turn the other readers in my direction. When the time came, by my cigarette-coupon watch, I replaced the book and went into the glaring heat of downtown. Back on Magazine Street, the Christus’s lovely daughter smiled without looking at me as she let me pass. “Well,” Mr. Christus said solemnly, “you may join us if you choose.” For a second I didn’t get it. When I understood, I said: “Can I bring someone along?” “You certainly can’t.” “Ah,” I said. “When will we be back here?” “I wouldn’t think for the best part of a year. If we get any gigs in this state at all. Problem?” prime green: remembering the sixties 55

  I shook my head, feeling ever fainter. “No problem.” “Can you come with us to Lake Chickasaw?” he asked. “We’re there tomorrow night.” “Can you make it?” he said, when I didn’t answer. “We’ll book you a room in this hotel tonight. You won’t even have to share. This time.” “We’ll buy you dinner,” his young daughter said. “If you can get back here.” “Sure,” I said. I felt as though I must be trembling. The thought of their dinner made me ill. I wanted the crazy life I was looking at more than anything. The last trace of gypsy life on the continent. I did not want to be stuck in New Orleans with my pregnant wife. All at once it seemed that the chance at theater I had opted away from in New York had spun around my way in these absurd trap- pings, in a mode for which “provincial” would be too pretentious a term. I wanted feverishly to clamber aboard this absurdity, and I wanted the ruthlessness and sangfroid to try. I don’t know what I saw shining there. Maybe just the chance to change the life I was making for myself and start a new one. Anyway, my theatrical fan- tasy was back shimmering, available if I could find the resources to go for it. I walked back through the hot streets, across Canal and down Royal to St. Philip, through the patio and up the inner stairs. Janice was on the balcony, leaning back on her chair, resting her feet. Nat- urally slim, she was showing seven months’ pregnancy. She looked radiant and lovely, a loose lock of brown hair over her eye. “Where’ve you been?” she asked me. “The library. And pursuing this phantom job.” I wanted a drink. I took a few dollars, which I could ill afford, from our pathetic money stash and went down to the corner saloon. 56 robert stone

  I had a couple of twofers at the bar and took a jug of plonk home with me. “What was the phantom job?” she asked. I was sitting a couple of feet away from her, looking down toward the river. I was thinking of towns like Lake Chickasaw, of the whole continent disappearing into times past. There was no chance that an experience like performing in The Cup would ever come my way again. I was too young to be tied down in this way. A world of adventures awaited, across conti- nents and across oceans. A world of beautiful and available women of which the Christus’s daughter, who indeed seemed to like me, was only the first. I looked over at Janice. And I thought, She’s done it to herself, committed to all this too young; she was just a kid. Committed to a louse like me, she’ll find out what a selfish creep I am. She can pass the
baby to her parents; they could help her, and she could have a life. And in turn I could have a life and cross those continents and oceans to where life was richer. To embrace fate, to live out the cruel rituals of life at the core of the flame, to do and to see everything. Oh, wow! To have the courage to be brutal and to reject convention and compromise. Chief Temple Guard was only the beginning. I snuck another look at her, and indeed she looked beautiful. And being so young, she looked innocent and trusting. She looked as though she loved me. So. At that moment I knew that I was not going anywhere. I loved her and that was fate. If I stood up to leave, my legs would fail, my frame wither, my step stumble forever. All my strength was sub- sumed by this rash, so unwise, too early love. There was no hope, ex- cept in this woman. She would give birth, and the new life would assert itself and take over our center and prepare to replace us. In- stead of far continents it was boring parenthood; we would just roll prime green: remembering the sixties 57

  down the old biology road like every other sucker. Trapped by na- ture’s illusion, like a bug by a predator’s coloration. I felt infinitely relieved, happy for a moment as I would hardly ever be. I thought: This rejoicing shows my mediocrity. Just another daddy Dagwood bourgeois jerk. Because if I had been destiny’s man, I thought, I would have walked—strided away with my bus sched- ule and my backpack, ready to ride from Chickasaw Lake to the Great Slave. But I was not, I could not, not any more than I could fly. I guess I also knew at about that moment that I would never leave her, not ever, that this thing was forever. Your great soul, your world historical figure, would have walked. Not Bob. Not your daddy, children. Leave your mother? No. So like the original Christus and the young man who could not leave the life he knew, I turned my back on the wager and went my way. The census, which my wife worked until virtually the day before she gave birth, was a dazzle of New Orleans strangeness. If kabbalah an- gels and Mayan gardens had appeared behind the flaking doors of impoverished New Orleans it would not have surprised us. More- over we were drawing the best temporary pay in the South as far as we knew. The hospital in which my daughter was born was Huey Long’s gift to his private tinhorn republic. It was segregated, which meant that everything had to be done twice, replicated. Only the poor went there. Fathers were not allowed in maternity. Doctors and nurses were condescending and sarcastic. It seemed that only the black nurse’s aides were kind. We had a girl and we called her Deidre. We moved apartments once, letting some passing friends stay 58 robert stone