April 25 2012

Forget about property. Let’s get down to cases.

In 1949, Oklahoma was just a decade or so past the worst of the Dust Bowl of the mid-1930s. The Great Depression had ended; a world war had come and gone. Most Okies that were vulnerable to being driven from their homes by weather or banks had long ago left for California. Of those remaining who had not been kicked out by circumstance, the able and the adventurous had gone to California, too, to work in war-time shipyards and aircraft factories. That left the old and the infirm and the Indians and folks with oil wells. Then my folks moved to Okmulgee.

They had married during the Great Depression, my mom and dad, she just out of high school and him just two years ahead of her. Photos show a handsome couple. She was a cheerleader and ROTC “sponsor,” a kind of girls’ auxiliary for the high school junior officer corps of the day. She had black hair and grey eyes and a nice figure. She was pretty. He was handsome, a football and basketball star with wavy blonde hair and a ready smile. While she finished high school, he and a friend, Jack, set out to make do as best they could in the mid 1930s: they started up a little logging operation in the swamps and along the bayous of north and central Louisiana. They had a team of mules and a wagon. They’d go into the swamp with the mules, cut down as much as they could, chain the logs and mule-drag them onto dry ground. At nights they’d sleep on the front porches of the Negroes who lived in and around the swamps and along the bayous. Once they had a wagon load they’d drive the mules into Shreveport and sell them to a black man who had a lumberyard. This fellow was a good businessman and he was honest and gave Dad and Jack fair price for the trees. It was common knowledge that he had a silent partner in the business, a white man who owned the local Ford dealership. This was pretty much the way black folks had to do business, but old man Harmon made out ok, it seemed.

Anyway, while Dad logged, Mom lived at home with her folks and finished high school at Fair Park, where Dad had gone and where I went twenty years later. Her father, Ernest, worked for the Kansas City Southern Railroad, a line which ran between Kansas City and Shreveport. Shreveport was a railway hub in those days and the KCS had a big yard down in the West End. Ernest had started working for the railroad back in the ‘teens, before the first war, finally exchanging a life as a sort of ne’er-do-well Kansas cowboy for that of a solid married working man once his wife, Elva had presented him with three kids; there would be five but one, the baby Buddy, died in the 1918 flu epidemic.

Ernest had a good job; he was foreman of a repair crew in the yards and he worked right through the Great Depression. That made it possible for him to support a household of his married children and their families and the two children who were still in school, my mom and her younger brother. So, once Mom graduated and she and Dad got married, she just stayed there and Dad moved in. That household was eight all told: Ernest and Elva; Mom and Dad; sister Blanche and her husband Carl, a  carpenter; brother Ralph who fooled around with radios and his wife, Juanita, a student in a nursing school. Dad’s folks lived on the outskirts of town with his two brothers, Ted and John Allen, and his sister, Ruth. Dad’s father, Floyd, had grown up on a farm in East Texas and married over there, where my dad was born. By the late 1930s, he had brought my grandmother, Madie (Mary Jane), and the family into Louisiana, to Shreveport where he found work at the Libbey-Owens-Ford glass factory as a snapper. A snapper was the guy who came around and nailed shut the boxes of lights the cutters had set out. Dad was the oldest child, so in 1937, when he and Mom got married, Ted and John Allen and Ruth were all still in school.

I don’t know too much about Dad and Mom’s early married life except that they were young and handsome and full of life. There are stories of big dances out at a swimming park near Cross Lake where bottles were thrown and knives pulled. Dad played a kind of semi-professional baseball in those days and their “team” would travel to little towns in Texas and Arkansas and play the local lads for half the gate. Wives would come along with baskets of fried chicken and bottles of illicit beer and sell them at the little ball fields. There would be the occasional dispute over money, either between the teams or among the women, and a hasty retreat was beat now and then. Dad said that Mom was the best pistol shot he had ever seen; they used to go riding out around Cross Lake sitting up on the back of Uncle Ralph’s Model A and shoot at mail boxes. Mom never missed Dad said, no matter how fast Ralph drove. My favorite picture of my mother was taken during WWII; Uncle Carl was home on leave from the SeaBees and Dad was over in the Philippines so there are Mom and Carl just back from hunting squirrels and Mom in her rolled up jeans and her left hand on the rifle at her side looks as comfortable as

Annie Oakley—or Bonnie Parker, whose personality, I have since come to think, was probably closer to Mom’s than was Annie Oakley’s.

The war came and it finally caught up with Dad, even though he was married with a kid and worked in a defense industry; by the middle of the war he was cutting glass at L-O-F in Shreveport, logging long behind him. He got drafted in late 1944 and we moved up to Kansas to be with Mom’s mother in Baldwin City, a small farming and college town about 50 miles west of Kansas City. Ernest had been killed in 1940, just months before I was born. He was scalded to death when a high-pressure steam line broke in the round-house where we and his gang were working on an engine. Elva had gone home to Kansas and was running a small café. We spent the rest of the war and a year after up there; Mom worked in a factory making ammunition boxes and I just ran around this little town of about 1200 living a kind of life that only exists now in Steven Spielberg movies—before the aliens arrive.

When Dad got back from Japan, where he had served in the first US Army unit to set foot on Japanese soil, we went back to Shreveport and Dad went back to the glass factory. He had turned down a commission and a career in the Regular Army. They took up with old friends, some changed by the war, Dad told me later, but others still the same. They danced and drank and smoked and the men in the glass cutting trade kept an eye on which plants were open and which were closed. I started school in Shreveport, at the same grade school my dad had attended but then we moved to Arkansas when the L-O-F plant shut down. Soon enough it was back to Shreveport but not for long. In the winter of 1948-9, we left Shreveport for several years. First stop and fateful, was Okmulgee, Oklahoma.

April 23 2012

[In my sketchy report about my trip to Viet Nam I mentioned that there were many pregnant women everywhere we went and promised an explanation. This is it: According to a local informant, the Year of the Dragon, this lunar year, is the most propitious one in which to be born, especially for boys, and so women try to achieve pregnancy at a time that will allow them to give birth in that year.]

Not long ago a friend who labors in the lawyering trade asked my opinion about adultery. Did I think, he asked, that there was as much adultery going around as one found in current fiction, or was adultery like quicksand? I wouldn’t blame you if your first thought was, “Who should know more than a lawyer?”  But then, maybe your first thought was, “Quicksand?” I went through those in that order and then asked myself, “Why is he asking me?” and “What does he mean by ‘current fiction’?”

This is what he was up to: He was asking me because he assumed that as a literature professor I spent a lot of time thinking, if not worrying, about the relationship between fiction and “truth” or “reality.” It seems he had been reading novels and New Yorker fiction for some time and had been struck by the number of these works in which adultery was situated at or near the center of everyone’s concern, if not everyone’s activity. This did not square with life as he experienced it or saw it, even as a lawyer, and the question to me was not whether it squared with my experience in life with adultery but whether it squared with my experience with literature. Or, he asked, was adultery like quicksand?

As the father of a young child, he had also spent some time not so many years ago watching television on Saturday mornings. He noticed that the cartoon adventure shows that made up so much of that programming was convention-driven, like much of popular culture. One convention, it turned out, was the ever-present threat of quicksand. Hardly a Saturday could go by without one episode in which a daring pre-teen hero or heroine would get herself stuck in deadly (always “deadly”) quicksand, followed by an episode on another channel of the exploits of yet another daring pre-teen adventurer freeing himself, or being freed, from deadly quicksand. No one ever explained what, exactly, quicksand was or why it was there, but it was omnipresent, for sure. Now suppose, he suggested, you were a member of an advanced alien race observing matters on Earth from another galaxy by monitoring what stray bits of television came your way on the extra-galactic equivalent of a Saturday morning. Among all that you might learn, one true thing should stand out: Earth was 10% water, 5% dry land, and 85% quicksand. Was not, he asked, adultery like quicksand? Was it not that medium in which New Yorker short story writers loved to enmesh their protagonists? Wouldn’t an alien of a certain age and disposition assume, every two weeks, that human relationships were 10% politics, 5% the search for weight-loss camps, and 85% adulterous?

Friend lawyer knew that the world is not awash (can one say that?) in quicksand. A few years ago a quicksand maven plotted a Google map with 100 known quicksand locations around the world; not so many considering that parking lots make up approximately 1/3 the metro footprint of American cities alone (there are 800 million parking spaces in America). While there is the occasional shooting, pepper-spraying, and/or irate-spouse-drive-over in a parking lot, these places don’t show up with anything like the frequency of quicksand as sites of mortal danger. (Actually, friend lawyer caught a “literary” convention in its waning hours when he watched Saturday morning tv. The heyday of tv and movie quicksand were the 1960s and 70s. Daniel Engber has documented quicksand’s rise and fall in this Slate piece from 2010: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2010/08/terra_infirma.html)

But what about adultery? I’m going to posit that friend lawyer’s real concern was not for the misguided alien but for us. What are we to make of the seeming centrality of adultery in adult fiction? Do we care how many such stories there have been since the git-go? Is it the case that only Adam and Eve were successfully monogamous and every marriage after has been the steamy stuff of literature? Or are we concerned about the effect? Does, as Louise De Salvo suggests in Adultery (2010), the very act of reading about adultery make us more likely to commit it. (“To commit it.” Stop a minute and think about that phrase. We don’t say, “to perform it” or “to accomplish it,” or “to achieve it.” This is a nasty act for us. We commit it. I remember when my once-Protestant parents joined the Roman Catholic Church, my Methodist grandmother did not write to the family at large that Joe Bob and Mary Helen had “converted” to Catholicism but rather that they had “turned” Catholic.) There might be a matter for concern if we thought by assigning Madame Bovary to be read we literature professors were endangering the marriages of those in our classes so encumbered.

But I rather think the issue is with fiction’s relationship to truth. If people don’t commit adultery all that often, should the act show up in fiction all the time? You know the answer is, “Why not?” Fiction’s relationship to truth is not an aggregate/disaggregate issue. The real question, or one of the real questions, is of “why” adultery shows up so much. After all, there are plenty of things we all do all the time that aren’t situated at the center of a complex of plots and motivations for sale on Amazon in numbers too large to ignore. Next installment I am just going to explore one of several reasons we write about and read about adultery: property.

April 10 2012

Back from my trip to Viet Nam. I’ll try to get down a few things I think about the last three weeks and then, in subsequent posts, get back to threads left unsecured last month. I wish I had some already-synthesized summing up to put here but I don’t; I have observations but I am really not sure they add up to much.

Let me start by saying that the confrontation between my war-time activities and present day Vietnamese reality never materialized. That is to say, I felt no deep emotional conflict over having bombed that physically lovely country so many years ago and then returning only to snap photos and soak in the exotic. At the war museum in Ho Chi Minh City I was repelled by the evidence of all of our destructive history there, but the difference between what I felt there from what I have felt at moments over the past 45 years was one of degree, not of kind. Sometime later I want to try to talk about the “American war” as the Vietnamese call it, but not now. I will only say that the Vietnamese seem an extraordinarily resilient people and their narrative of that war characterizes it as but one episode in a long, long war of national liberation beginning in the 19^th century.

Generally, Viet Nam is a young country demographically. Most people are younger than 40 and the rest seem to be old. I’m not sure, though, that the last part of that observation is accurate. At first glance, people on the street seem either young and handsome/lovely or old and worn; where, one wonders, is everyone over 30 and younger than 65? I’m not sure but there are a couple of possibilities, each premised on the assumption that they are present but obscured.

One, which accounts for some of the phenomenon, presented itself just a few days before we left for home. We were “trekking” near Viet Nam’s border with China, in the northwest of the country, near a town called Sapa, and were joined from time to time by Hmong women going to or from market, fields, or bamboo stands. Often they wanted to sell us something but in every case they would casually fall into step along side us and walk along for a mile or so before veering off in one direction or another. My wife chatted with one woman who had some English (most Hmong women [we saw few Hmong men and they never spoke] knew the phrases “Where are you from?” and “Will you buy something from me?”) and said later to our trek guide that Hmong life must be very hard. “Why,” he asked, “do you say that?” Her response was that in conversation she discovered that the woman she had assumed to be in her seventies, as is my wife, was really only fifty. What other than a hard life could age one so? The trek guide’s answer was one word, “opium.” Many Hmong women smoke opium their entire lives and one consequence is the haggard, worn look. Opium production is illegal in Viet Nam but little energy is spent enforcing those laws against local grower/users. This is the case even in the region just to the west of Sapa where Viet Nam, Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos come together in the Golden Triangle, one of the world’s two major sources of illicit opium, the other being the “Golden Crescent” with Afghanistan at its center.

The other possibility is the one put forward by my wife: life in Viet Nam is harsh. I think this is particularly true in the major cities. Actually, life among the Hmong and the other ethnic minorities of the northwest seems hard but not harsh. Life in the streets of Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, however, looks harsh to me. Those two cities remind me of New York City in the 70s and early 80s and of Managua, Nicaragua, in the mid-80s. Life there seems to be lived in the streets, endlessly engaged in curb-side capitalism; on corners and sidewalks men make keys, repair shoes, cut hair, practice every variant of bricolage. My favorite was the man who sat on a small stool on a corner of a busy intersection with a tank of compressed air and a hose, waiting for the moto (motorbike, of which there are seemingly five times as many than autos) with a flat tire to struggle up to him. Both times I saw him, on successive days, he had no business but he was stoically (?) waiting for fortune while entertaining his young grandson (?). Interestingly enough, given the rarity of cars on side streets in Hanoi, there were a number of tire repair store fronts where punctures and the like could be fixed on the sidewalk. Folks reading this in Brooklyn will remember 4^th Avenue in the late 70s and the “Flats Fixed” storefronts along that big street between Atlantic Avenue and Sunset Park. Just like that! Men sell services on the street in Hanoi and HCMC; women sell goods. Because the sidewalks are filled with men at their tinkers’ trades and with hundreds of small “pop-ups” for eating, seated on low plastic stools at low plastic tables while the food simmers over charcoal fires in ingenious small burners, women walk in the streets carrying baskets full of pineapples, onions, dried fish, bread, pastries, flowers, mushrooms, herbs, caps, scarves, t-shirts, flags…I can’t do justice to the number of women or the variety (and redundancy) of their goods. The only men I ever saw selling a “thing” as contrasted to a “service” were selling books, carried in the crook of an arm in a small pasteboard box.

I don’t know how this life feels; it looks harsh because it seems the effort to make it work is unremitting. At the Women’s Museum in Hanoi we saw a short film in which women street vendors described their lives: isolation from families, incredibly long hours, poor health, little profit. None of these women, and none of the men at curbside, was young. About half-way through the trip a text came to mind that made it all a bit more familiar to me. In 1941, in an essay on comic postcards, George Orwell noted that in the Britain of such postcards the population was either quite young or quite old. This was not, he argued, just license on the part of such postcard auteurs as Donald McGill, but rather a reflection of a desperate reality of English life. In the England of the 20s and the 30s, Orwell said, there was no such thing as adulthood. There was youth and then there was old age; life in England erased anything like the possibility that the impulse to love and procreate would lead to domestic adulthood, family, hearth, comfort. Reaching one’s majority meant the onset of toil and deprivation in a heartless industrial landscape where youth served until suddenly overtaken by age. That is how urban Viet Nam looks; there are many many beautiful young women and energetic young men and there are many many haggard, thin, worn elders. There are very few men and women of simple mature adulthood.

Oh, and there are many many young children, all astonishingly lovely. They will soon be joined by a considerable number of younger siblings if the presence of pregnant women on every block is any indication. Just why there are so many pregnant young women in Viet Nam at this moment is a matter for next time.

March 17 2012

No occasion to savor. That’s how Charlotte saw this inevitable mess of teen-age sex.  If Darlene was popular, a cheerleader, petite, perky, Charlotte was quite, desperate, unlovely. All they had in common was that they were both Mormons; they didn’t even know each other. Charlotte went to the other white public high school in town (there was also a black public high school, a Catholic boy’s high school, and one for Catholic girls), so my meeting her was really by chance as the town was divided not only along racial lines but by class. My high school was in the working class part of town and the other school, Byrd, was over where dads wore ties to work and moms belonged to clubs. Charlotte and I met at KJOE, one of the radio stations in town that courted a teen-aged audience. KJOE played popular music of the day, including rock and roll, and on Saturday mornings offered a show “hosted” by two teenagers, each from a different high school. On the Saturday in question, I was the boy from my school, Fair Park, and Charlotte was the girl, from Byrd.

Charlotte’s father ran a record distributing company, so she and her younger sister got all of the latest releases before any of us heard them; it may have been that the knowledge of pop music that proceeded from her inside track had led the radio show’s producer to pick her from all those teeny-boppers who applied to be guest disc jockeys. It may have also helped that the record distributing business in Shreveport, like my dad’s dice game, was a bit on the margins of the law and had, whether it was Charlotte’s dad’s choice or not, ties to organized crime, no small influence in radio at the time. (KJOE was not the biggest station on the air in Shreveport in those days, so they tried hard to capture as much of the high-school audience as they could. They even went so far as to hire a part-time afternoon “personality” for Saturdays, a young airman from the local base over in Bossier City who had auditioned as soon as he got to town. He didn’t know a lot about music but he had created a stable of on-air characters that got your attention. My favorite was AL Sleet, the Hippy Dippy Weatherman. George Carlin—who knew! I think KJOE was his model for the “Wonderful World of W-I-N-O” routine.)

Charlotte and I only did one show together but we hit it off pretty well and I spent more and more time driving over to her side of town. We dated and went to a few drive-in movies but Charlotte was as inhibited as Darlene was not, so we saw a lot of monster movies. I always took my old Plymouth, not the Rambler. Over time, we considered ourselves “going steady;” the problem was that she didn’t know about Darlene and Darlene didn’t know about her. Back then the irony of going steady with two Mormon girls was lost on me; I was just caught up in the unfolding possibilities of romance and the peculiar force of custom. I made the best adjustment I could.

But this part of the long explanation of my inexperience and my reluctance to take Louise up on her patio invitation has nothing really to do with that last year in high school. Charlotte and I “broke up,” for reasons that made little sense to either of us since we weren’t angry or hurt by the other; we just sort of lost interest. Then Darlene and I broke up for real reasons, mostly that we couldn’t stand each other, and events just swept me along through graduation, that next summer, and then off to college. In November, I came home for Thanksgiving and hadn’t been home more than a couple of hours before I got a call from Charlotte. She wanted to go to a party in town but didn’t want to go without a date; would I take her and we could catch up on things? I have no memory of the party, over in Byrd territory, but boy, do I remember what happened later. I drove over to a spot by the river and parked, just to talk. Charlotte was a year behind me, so she was very much caught up in matters that I by then considered pretty juvenile, and I listened to a long list of parental and school issues. Then, suddenly, she offered herself to me, offered with such directness and desperation that she scared the hell out of me. Had she been less desperate, or seemed less so, matters might have taken a different turn but something about the moment seemed wrong. Not morally wrong but emotionally. All the time we had gone together I had never succeeded in convincing Charlotte about sex, anything about sex, especially sex, and I wasn’t quite dumb enough to think that because now I was a college man I was suddenly more attractive than I had been nine months ago.

It took a few minutes but I convinced her that we weren’t going to have sex. She sat there and then began to cry and apologize at the same time. At first I thought she was embarrassed, caught up in some unfathomable wave of desire or illusion or something. But that was not it. Charlotte was pregnant by a guy whose rich parents had sent him away to military school and she didn’t know what to do. Her plan, such as it was, was to have sex with me and then somehow convince me that I was the father. Her sense of me, probably correct, was that I was a much nicer guy than Ben-whose-last-name-I-forget, and that I would marry her. What I am about to say sounds absurd, even to me, but to that moment I had never actually, realistically associated sex with paternity. I mean, I understood about sex and babies, but had no real notion of paternity, what it meant, how it proceeded from this act, that decision, those compromises. Well, it all came startlingly clear to me, in an instant. The moment was one as if I had just cheated death, had seen the bullet in slow motion as it slid past my ear, had watched the car on ice turn and turn only to find itself on the right side of the road headed in the right direction.

So, on the patio at the Shreve’s Landing Club three years later, with, truth be told, not much more experience than Darlene’s gift, Louise’s offer pulled up images of a tearful Charlotte and the fate I had escaped. Had I been as sophisticated as I thought I wanted to be, I would have accepted Louise’s rides and would have then, only a few months later, understood immediately what Marie meant. As it was, it only hit me as I was walking down the street from Marie’s toward my parents’ house. While the understanding lacked the immediacy of the revelation of mortality that Charlotte’s unveiling of her plot brought with it, it was every bit as transformative. I have, in all my physical relations since that day, kept my weight on my elbows. Even more, I have tried to be the kind of man who keeps his weight on his elbows in every occasion. I mean, it seemed to me, right then, that I wanted to be the kind of man who was both in and yet sympathetically apart from every moment. By sympathetically, I mean not detached coldly but watchful, aware of the reality that the other or others in the moment are experiencing. I confess that the temptation is to hold myself away more icily, as that is actually easier than what I consider the morally responsible thing to do, to be constantly careful of the presence of others without giving oneself over to abandonment in their presence, whether in sex or any other discourse. Cold detachment leads to a kind of formalism in which one can only claim to be present, without offering any proof. There is a line from e. e. cummings that tells the consequence of that kind of detachment:

since feeling is first

who pays attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you;

Over the years my goal has been to be aware of the syntax of things without “paying attention” to it. I want to be in the moment without being “of” it, I suppose. I heard a chaplain at Dartmouth College examine “moral imagination” in a way that suits me. He said moral imagination is not just the ability to understand another’s point of view or even feel another’s pain, one of which is reachable logically and the other is observable. For me, the trick is to imagine the other’s moral conflict, the contradictions he feels when caught between his ideals and necessity, between justice and mercy. One cannot do this if one gives over wholly to the kiss. The best way is to keep one’s weight on one’s elbows, a slight remove, enough to be able to see into the other’s center, with care.

I have not always been able to do this, of course; once when I did not should be talked about later. I have, however, always tried and always been aware when I have failed. The failures, in some instances, meant more to me than to the others, who felt the weight but that is to be expected. It is hard to give a useful answer at three in the morning to the question, “What are you doing up there on your elbows?” At that moment I always wonder, myself.

[Tomorrow my wife and I start a three-week trip to Hong Kong and Vietnam and I am not sure how often I can post to this spot. I was last in Vietnam during the Southeast Asian War and I assume I will have some feelings about this return. If I can, I will write.]

March 14, 2012

There are not so many drive-in movie “theaters” around these days, but when Darlene and I were just awakening to sex (well, I was just awakening; I think Darlene had been up several hours before me), they were very important because those darkened pastures furrowed with alleyways which were in turn spiked every few yards with speaker stands were just about the only place a couple of kids could go with even a modicum of expectation of the privacy necessary to grow up.

Here’s how drive-ins worked: A huge movie screen fitted in a sturdy wooden or tin frame stood with its back to a road or highway but removed from the sound of traffic by several hundred yards. You turned off the road onto a long driveway of sorts that led to a ticket booth. You paid, not much, and drove through the symbolic gate (it couldn’t have physically stopped you from cruising right through it), past the screen and into the field where row after row of metal poles with square speakers attached, one to each side of a pole, were arranged in a very slightly curved semi-circle in front of the screen. From front to back of the field, from just in front of the screen to the fence at the rear were maybe thirty rows of these speakers. You would turn, usually left, into one of those rows and find a spot that suited you, as much toward the middle as you could, and then turn, again left, into place beside the pole with the speakers attached, the speaker for you being right there by the driver’s window when you stopped the car on the slight incline that elevated the nose of the car ever so slightly to match the angle of your vision to the height of the screen. You rolled down your window on the driver’s side and hooked the square speaker over the top of the three or so inches of glass you left above the car door frame by the wire or plastic hook on its back. A knob on the front of the speaker controlled the volume. You were set to watch the movie.

That is, if you went by yourself. But if you had a date, you drove directly to the back of the lot, found a slot on one end of the row or the other, turned up the volume of the speaker but left it on the stand, and waited not for the movie to start, but for night to fall. I always thought it was funny that you left the speaker on the stand (how did we learn these things?). I realize why it was that way—the deal was that when you started to “make out” with your date, you rolled the window up for privacy. Now, windows being what they are, rolling one up doesn’t give you much privacy, unless you assume that whatever sounds you make over the course of the next two hours or so will interfere with the dialogue from the movie as it is being enjoyed by the older, married couple with two kids in the back seat whom, you hope anyway, have not pulled up into the slot next to yours.

In any case, two young folks determined to find the intersection of desire and automobile design were all set soon enough. The car was important. This all took place before bucket seats were standard in American automobiles; most cars had bench type front and back seats, which were, as you are now guessing, very inviting. Most of what went on in the front seat was pleasant if a bit awkward, given the presence of the steering wheel, the gear shift, and the transmission hump that ran the length of the car floor from engine to rear axle. When I applied to join the Air Force years later, one form to be filled out asked if I had ever been denied employment because of an inability to assume certain positions; I immediately thought of the front seat of my 1948 Plymouth, my first car, and many a summer night at the Joy Drive-in. Not employment but certainly fulfillment had been denied.

But that was not to be the case the night I lost my virginity, if not my innocence. (These are different things, as I am sure you understand. Read Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, to see how that argument goes.) Luckily for me, my father had, a couple of years earlier, suffered one of his rare lapses in taste and bought a Rambler station wagon.

As you can see, this is not a classically handsome car, but as we were planning a move to California, ill-fated in some ways but exciting for me, and we were going to do it in one trip hauling everything we owned, something boxy and solid seemed called for. The Rambler got us there and back and a couple of years later I discovered the Rambler’s contingent appeal: the back seats laid down flat into the cargo area and created the drive-in equivalent of a double bed. Whereas with a standard sedan a couple could crawl over the seatbacks from the front onto the narrow but unobstructed back seat (for reasons of delicacy, we never wanted to be seen opening the doors of the front seat, emerging, and reentering the car in the back; that was like signaling to the world our intentions), with the Rambler, you just slid into the expanse of the cargo bay which the young man of the duo had already prepared with such amenities as he could muster with arousing his mother’s suspicion.

It was at the Sunset Drive-in, in the beloved Rambler, that Darlene let me know that we were about to push past the observed limits of going steady. I’ll skip the details but will say that it was a warm night, Darlene knew what she was doing, and because we had the windows rolled up as I have explained already one would do, it had got a bit steamy in the car. Now when we had parked next to our speaker stand, we were the only car on that row and it was already dark. I have no idea what the movie was or how long we had been there, but my memory is that it wasn’t long, Darlene being propelled by a sort of urgency that most men pray to encounter at least once in their careers, before the game was afoot. Actually, given what happened, it is probably more accurate to say the game was a rear.

Warm late spring Saturday night, sex, clothes get in the way for any number of reasons. There was just enough light from the distant movie screen through the steamed up windows of the car for me to make out the contours of Darlene’s bare rear end as she lay there beside me, leaning on her elbows (ironic, that, no?) and gazing into my eyes as if to ask, “So, what do you think of that?” I reached across her back to roll down the window as it was more than a little close in there at the moment and as the window came down I found myself looking into the face of a middle-aged woman who had apparently just arrived because she was reaching out of her open car window for the speaker, her shoulders and head halfway out of her own car and her hand about to grab it. At first she just looked at me but then, attracted I am sure by the effect of white light on bare skin, looked directly into the frame of Darlene’s considerable charms positioned perfectly in the rectangle of our own car window. This was not the movie for which the lady had paid. I have to admire her discipline though. She simply, and slowly, drew back her hand, her arm, her shoulders, and rolled up her window. I was transfixed. She started her car and backed out, then drove away.

Darlene seemed unmoved by the experience but I was certain that Missus Lady was headed straight for the outdoor concession stand in the middle of the lot, where we would be reported to some sort of agency of control. After a bit of pleading I got Darlene back into her jeans and we sped off into the night, Darlene’s mission accomplished but without much time to reflect or savor. But then again, as I was to discover, most teen-aged sex, of whatever degree, left one with little time or even reason to savor or reflect.

March 9, 2012

To this day I don’t know that I could say just what prompted Orlando to offer this heartwarming gesture to a lonely boy; Louise was very polite but she also made it very clear that she had not stepped out onto the patio to see if I needed more ice water. I wish I could tell you that I sized this up immediately, but I was still thinking of the bunch at the bar as secretaries on break. I didn’t really understand, until later after talking with Dad about the evening, the differences between prostitutes and call girls, and it was into this latter category that Louise and the other regulars at Orlando’s haven placed themselves. Now, for many folks, we may be talking about a distinction without a difference, but the status worth of that distinction was important to these young women. In passing, I might note that of a weekend, from time to time, one could spot Mr. Lynn, who ran a modeling agency in Shreveport, Mr. Lynn’s International Models, as he often frequented the Shreve’s Landing Club with those of his models who were of age. On those occasions, the bar was quite a pleasant place to find oneself, what with Mr. Lynn’s girls and Orlando’s aggregation all at work, and there was much coming and going out of and into the night.

Back on the patio, I was flummoxed. I wanted to take Louise up on what I finally understand was her suggestion that I finish my dinner and then come with her to her apartment from which she would deliver me safe and sound, perhaps sounder, to my folks’ house in the morning, before they got home. There was just one problem; I was scared to death. Even now I cringe trying to imagine what I finally managed to say to her that got me out of the spot I was in.  Don’t ask me if I now wish I had just let Louise call the shots that night; of course I do. I’m not really sure what it was that I was afraid of, but it was something like “unintended consequences.” Not venereal disease; I hardly knew what that was (those were?). No, it was that which we were all acculturated to fear the most, pregnancy. I know, I know; this lady was a professional, or at least a ranked amateur, but that certainly wasn’t clear to me at that very moment. All I could think of was my visit home the previous Thanksgiving and the present my old girlfriend Charlotte offered me.

Charlotte was one of the two Mormon girls with whom I had “gone steady” the first half of my senior year in high school. If you are very young, you might not know about going steady. Like a lot of social ritual among adolescents in the 1950s, it was child’s enactment of an adult’s privilege. In this case, the ritual aped marriage. I say “aped” not just because going steady tried to imitate the domesticity of the households we saw around us, with that placid intimacy’s promise of passion sometime later, dear, but because we boys were not much less brutish than our primate cousins, truth be told. If we had only known about the Bonobos, maybe we wouldn’t have been so desperately male about it all. The deal was that the boy would give his girl a ring, which she would wear on a chain around her neck or, and this seemed to be favored by girls who went with athletes, she would wrap tape around the narrower part of the band and wear it on her marriage finger. This sign meant “keep away,” “watch your language around her,” ““we can make out whenever we want to,” and everyone wanted to believe it stood for the kind of long-term commitment that was only a prologue to marriage and real sex.

Real sex was at a premium in the 50s in Shreveport. This was before the pill, before the second wave of the feminist movement, before the sexual revolution, just on the emerging cusp of rock ‘n’ roll’s tsunami (I started high school the year Bill Haley released “Rock Around the Clock”). As far as I could tell, most of the boys wanted to have sex and none of the girls did, with one or two exceptions. These exceptional girls had a hard row to hoe because while they “had” what all the boys wanted, none of the boys were supposed to want it from them. The whole point of our adolescence was a sort of involuntary but rigidly enforced delayed gratification, words that appeared on no vocabulary test we had ever taken but which stood for adult assumptions which were making our lives miserable. So, we pined and moaned over the sex we weren’t having with the girls who only wanted to go steady with us and were at a loss, in that 4 AM of the soul, to understand why we weren’t going to have it with the girls that seemed willing to share. But every now and then the miraculous happened and one of the girls who only wanted to go steady would change her mind. That’s what happened to me.

March 5, 2012

I can’t recreate the argument that ensued when Mom found out that Dad had spent my college clothes money on a silk suit and that wasn’t even the worst part. I mean, the suit was bad enough, but the shoes were what she kept coming back to, time and again. You have to hand it to him, really; the suit was gorgeous but the shoes were extraordinary. I don’t mean they were bizarre or a funny color. Their extraordinary-ness lay in the very fact that he had bought them. They were just so unnecessary and so obviously a purchase the only reason for the existence of which was gratification. You didn’t need these shoes just to walk around in. It was the first inkling I got of what luxury might mean from a negative perspective.

Here’s what I have come to understand about the shoes and the suit. The suit was its own explanation; for the years that Dad kept it, it looked wonderful on him. When he wore it, he became another person, physically. You would want to stop and watch him walk by, that suit looked that good.  Dad was a stickler about tailoring. He had the jacket collar lowered a good half an inch so that the right amount of shirt collar would show and the jacket would never ride up so that the shirt collar might disappear as if down his back. He had the sleeves shortened so that 3/8 of an inch of French cuff would show, just enough to give you a glimpse of his cuff links. His shirts, by the way, had no pockets. A shirt with a breast pocket was a day-time shirt, one you wore to work; a man dressed for the evening had no need to put anything in a shirt pocket. When he wore that suit, Dad never carried a wallet; he had a money clip so nothing would break the line from shoulder to the point where the trouser leg touched the top of the shoe.

The shoe. Those shoes were what were called “Italian” slip-ons. They were absolutely seamless from toe to heel and the cut away over the arch revealed just a hint of the stocking. Such shoes, in a soft black leather, were very popular in the late 1950s; some cool boys wore them with Levi’s and white socks. But a soft black leather was not what Dad was after, and he would never wear white socks with anything but his work shoes, the ones with the steel toes. So this is where conjecture enters the game. I think Dad’s vanity forced him (allowed him?) to make a virtue out of necessity. My father had very small feet. I’d say, almost dainty. I couldn’t get into his shoes and I just have your average size nines. I think Dad knew that this suit was going to attract a lot of  attention  and he needed something to prevent his little feet from disappearing into the floor and throwing the whole presentation out of whack. It was a Fred Astaire problem, in reverse. The slightly tapered trouser legs helped, just like the lowered jacket collar kept the starched white shirt collar visible against Dad’s tanned neck; they didn’t help enough. Dad needed you to see his feet so the proportions would work and there were only two ways to do that. One was to buy a pair of shoes at least a size too big and hope no one would notice, as if you were a short guy with lifts in your shoes or big heels. The other was to wear a pair of shoes that in and of themselves would justify the suit, a pair of shoes not dependent on the feet in them, shoes that drew your mind from the foot to the marvelous thing the foot was making possible. Dad went for option number two.

Option number two. The Italian slip on. Lined in doeskin, uppers made of deerskin, but—and get this, because this is what made the shoes—the deerskin uppers were covered by a layer of shantung silk that just missed matching exactly the color of the shantung silk suit. Of course, that was Dad’s decision; the silk exterior of the shoe signaled its affinity with the suit but the slightly dark grey-shading-toward-black pearl reminded you that this moment was not just about the suit but about the man who wore it, the man who could think to buy such shoes the same day he bought such a suit.

I think you can tell from this account that I’m not angry about this. I can’t even say, “Anymore,” because I don’t think I was mad at him then. I might have been hurt, but that was just as likely to have been the consequence of having my mother tell me over and over what a betrayal that suit and those shoes represented. I have to say I don’t think I felt it that way. My memory was that I was so excited about going to college that nothing bothered me. Besides, by that time I had come to realize how many slips there were likely to be ‘twixt the cup and the lip for my father. It was awkward, I admit, negotiating a much abbreviated shopping trip with my mother for what we could scrounge together. And I am certain that it was she who was truly betrayed. Whatever her failings, my mother was excited for me. Well, actually, Mom was a thorough-going narcissist and so my going off to college was really about her. Dad’s betrayal, it seems, was a crime against her sense of herself. Besides, she had saved that money on her own. She had a lot invested, accidentally or not, in that suit and that pair of silk shoes.

So there I was, three years later, on the patio at the Shreve’s Landing Club, not much more sophisticated than I had been that summer I left, wearing pretty much the same sort of college boy beiges and plaids that Mom and I had bought on credit at Penney’s, not at Selber’s, where Mr. Aaron’s son outclassed me in every way. I wanted to be classy; I had, the luck of the draw, enough of Dad’s sense of style to make me presentable to folks. And like him, I could get along with almost anyone, tell stories, dance. I wasn’t even a virgin, thanks to a high-school classmate, one of two Mormon girls I went steady with at the same time (another story, I’m afraid), but I wouldn’t say I was experienced. In fact, let’s say I was inexperienced, as became evident soon enough when one of the women from the bar strolled onto the patio, caught my eye, and walked over. Standing there, she said,

“Hi. I’m Louise. Orlando sent me.”

March 3, 2012

[With apologies for editing as this is being done somehat remotely.]

Selber Brothers took up an entire corner in the middle of downtown Shreveport in the 1950s. It was one of two or three emporiums of the sort owned by Jews; another was Rubensteins and there was a very big toy store owned by the Wiseman family. Their son, Carl, was the only Jewish kid I knew growing up, and that was because Carl, who went to a private school somewhere, was my competitor for a while for the affections of Nanine Carney. He and I would share her attention almost every weekend, it seemed. Nanine went to a Catholic girls school and on Saturdays wore her hair in a ponytail at the side of her head. I had never seen anything like that and I'll bet the nuns didn't let her get away with it during the week.

The history of the Jews in the South is a pretty complicated tale and I invite you take a look at it some time. Suffice it for the moment, though, to just say that working class Christian kids in Shreveport had almost no opportunity to know any Jewish kids. In fact, my Dad had to explain to me that the Selber brothers were Jews; except for bible school, Jews had never entered my world view. Dad used to take me with him on Saturdays when I was just a boy and we would walk around town and he would tell me things I needed to know, like about the Selber brothers. Or we would get in the car and drive over to the Corner Bar, near the glass plant, and he would let me sit at the bar with him while he talked with friends and made a bet or bought a punch ticket.

This was true throughout my childhood, wherever we lived; Dad would take me out on a Saturday, or come home after work and pick me up, to a bar or a cafe, somewhere where men hung out and talked sports and cars and had a beer and shot pool. Once he came home from work when I was in sixth grade and told me to hop in the car, that there was someone he wanted me to meet. We sped, really, to the Corner Bar. Inside, Dad walked right past the bar and steered me to a table in the back where some men and a woman were sitting. One of the men had long sideburns and, as it was late in the day, his stubble was showing very dark, as dark as his hair. He was dressed entirely in black and had a bolo tie around his neck, closed by what must have been a pure silver slide fashioned as a longhorn steer head.

"Mr. LaRue, this is my son, Chris."

My father had a sort of deferential politeness about him when he felt he was outclassed, and this was one of those times, for the man in the bolo tie was none other than "Lash" LaRue, whip-wielding star of many a Saturday matinee western. His only competitor in the whip-lash western business was a pudgy, bland character Monogram Studios called "Whip" Wilson and believe me, that was no contest. I was awe-struck and tongue-tied and have no memory of anything I might have said or done, except that we sat there for a while and the talk just went on around me as such talk always did. All I can remember otherwise is that woman at the table was Lash's sister, who owned the beauty parlor next door to the bar and it was she he had come to town to visit.

Few of my outings with my dad were as exciting as that but they were solidly informative. One Saturday we made two stops I can still see very clearly. The first was to the Subway Pool Hall downtown where Dad wanted to place a bet on a horserace. You entered the Subway down a flight of stairs from the sidewalk, not unlike entering a subway station in New York, and the door gave way to a big room full of pooltables and a bar along one wall. At the end of that bar was a door and, just as in the movies, when you went through it you were suddenly confronted by rows of men at desks with telephones and ticker-tape printers and across one whole wall was a huge tote-board with all the day's races posted. For some reason I remember that my dad wore a baseball cap and a gabardine jacket that zipped up. Ever since that day my  "imaginary" has contained that image of a working man on his day off gone to place a bet, have a beer, touch a wider world; baseball cap, jacket, everything.

Our second stop that day was Selber Brothers; Dad was going to buy me a shirt, a dress shirt, for reasons I cannot remember. But it was not the shirt I remember, it was the sight of a black man, a young man, in cotton chino slacks and a striped sport shirt waiting for an elevator. Most of you will not recall the South in the early 1950s. In that South black folks still stepped off the sidewalk for whites to pass, went to the back doors of restaurants to place an order, and one never saw a black man or woman in the exercise of any authority or initiative, unless one went to the funeral of  someone who had "done" for your family. We went to separate schools, churches, doctors, sat apart on trolleys, in theaters, never even in the same room in restuarants.

We did shop in the same stores, but black patrons were waited on last. Once I had a job for a very short time in a luggage store downtown. The stock was expensive but not outrageous. One day a black woman came in and I waited on her. She didn't buy anything and when she left, my boss came over to me visibly angry. I thought he was upset because I had not made a sale but that was not what was on his mind. What bothered him was that I had addressed the customer as "Ma'am," as in "Can I help you, Ma'am?" He told me that if I ever called a "nigra" woman by anything but her first name, if I knew it, or nothing at all, he would fire me on the spot. "Ma'am" was reserved for white women and white women only. I quit.

In Selber's that day, even as young as I was, I knew that this young black man was out of place. There was nothing about him to signal that he was shopping, he looked comfortable, he looked as though he intended to ride that elevator, which was something i had never seen before. And he was dressed better than most anybody in the store. Dad saw me staring and said to me, quietly, "That's Mr. Aaron's son." Mr. Aaron was Aaron Selber, the principal owner of the store and the young black man was his illegitimate son.

That was my introduction to the complexities of race in Shreveport. Over the years, my father was a gentle and astute guide to me through the various narratives of race and identity in the South. In this case, I learned that young Mr. Selber was Mr. Aaron's yard child. Yard children, in Shreveport, were the mulatto children of white fathers who were allowed to come to their father's house and play with their half-siblings, but they were not allowed inside the house; they had to stay outside, in the yard, and go home when it got dark. If one's father was well-to-do, like Mr. Aaron, then one could get sent off to school up north, have a summer job in the store or the law office or the accoountung firm. If your father was a working stiff, then you might get Christmas gifts but probably not a birthday card. I suppose there is a good chance that Scobie was my grandfather's son, a son he could not abandon in the yard.

There's so much more to say about my father and race and class, but we left him in the men's department at Selber's. And that story was not about me at age 10 looking for a shirt and discovering race but about him at 41 and that shantung silk suit, not to mention the shoes. 

March 2, 2012

Shantung, or Shandong, is a province in northeast China. No, wait, don't go back to Angry Birds. This is about what Dad did the summer before I left for college.

Anyway, in Shantung Province a weave of silk is produced that is closer to coarse than to fine, offers a rough surface to the hand; some threads are thicker than others. As a consequence, the silk wears exceptionally well and retains structure. For these reasons, Shantung silk is very much in demand in the making of men's suits. This is especially true, or was so in the 1950s, among Italian designers and, it then followed, such suits as were made by these designers, and/or the copies and "knockoffs" they engendered, were very popular among certain men who made their living off the books, shall we say,  and their friends. Dad's experience with the two gunsels from Tulsa notwithstanding, the life represented by such a suit seemed to him a glamorous one, a classy life. If he was always careful not to take unnecessary risks, he still liked to look as though he might. And look as though he might have chosen well to take that risk. The suit might be evidence of just such daring and the necessary good luck to make it feasible.

Such a suit as he might have would have to conform to certain prescriptive criteria. It must be modern, so it must be single-breasted with two buttons; none of that Ivy-League three-button pretension for men who risked all on a throw of the dice or a woman's glance. It must be at least somewhat "continental," so the jacket had twin side vents, not a centre vent, and the trousers were tapered and cuffless and were secured with a waist tab, not a belt. On the occasion when my father would wear a pair of trousers with belt loops, he would use a tie or a scarf instead of a leather belt. This was what Fred Astaire did in his movies and Dad was a close observer of all that Astaire did. It was Dad who told me, many years before I was introduced to "film studies,"  to watch Astaire's hands as he danced. Dad pointed out that Astaire never let his hands occupy a flat plane; he always kept one or two fingers bent at the second joint and his index finger always seemed about to point to something at a slight angle away from his partner. The reason, Dad explained, was that Astaire's hands were huge and very white and if he did not do something to break up the plane they filled, they would command the screen given the white lighting used in black and white cinematography and distract the viewer from the dance. 

Don't ask me how he knew that; I think he had a natural affinity for performance. For a working man he had such varied, even exquisite tastes. He loved jazz, especially the clarinet, and he loved ballet, especially Maria Tallchief. Of course, he was a sucker for Cyd Charisse. But he loved gospel and country and western music, too. And it was he who said that the decline of rhythm and blues into mere rock 'n'roll could be dated from the first time an electric guitar replaced the sax in the solo break.

But in the summer of 1958, my classy father came up short on the judgement tip. As I said, we had come to a fork in life's road (I wish I hadn't said that, but there it is, today's cliche) and, I don't know, I suppose he felt lost, or maybe threatened. Father-son conflicts are pretty old hat but they are real enough and in a case like this, where we had no real reason to be angry with one another, whatever emotions that arose, for each of us, ran below the surface. I can't recall any specific emotions about leaving or about transcending my dad or replacing him. I know I always wanted to be like my father, or least like about eighty percent of him, but I never wanted to be him. As for him, I don't know what threat he might have perceived in me. I might be off to be in the world in a way he never would be, but that world, whatever it was, seems to me even now to have few of the characteristics of the world my dad loved to entertain in his dreams for himself. As for that ol' Oedipal arm wrestle, I doubt he worried about me. He and Mom were pretty unhappy and she had found her own substitutes by then (the "to be told later" parts I promised earlier), but try as she might, I was not one of them.

No, I think it was nothing quite so dramatic. It was just that part of my dad that was less than he needed to be, the part of him that was vain and petty and thoughtless, perhaps heedless is the better word. Let me just posit that it was my vain, bewildered father who walked into the men's department of Selber Brothers Department Store that Saturday in late July of 1958, not Fred Astaire.

March 1, 2012


Today is filled up with work and at least part of tomorrow is a travel day as I head upstate for the weekend. But I'll try to get back on line later on Friday and see what Dad did and why. Thanks for reading.

February 29, 2012

I don’t know where my father got his love of clothes. No one in his family seemed to give a second thought to what they wore, with an exception I’ll get to in a moment or two. My grandfather and grandmother were country folk. She was Irish, illiterate, religious, stout but pretty as a red-haired girl and in her later years she could have posed for a Dorothea Lange photo from the Depression. In fact, as long as I knew her, from infancy until my mid-twenties, when she died, she wore nothing that could not have been ordered from a Sears catalog in 1936. She had never traveled outside of East Texas/West Louisiana; the farthest away from home she got was one trip to the beach at Galveston. She raised three boys and a girl and any number of working men and women who gravitated to her warmth, including Scobie, a young Black boy who came to live with the family when my dad was just 10 and was like a third brother to him. My grandfather loved Scobie and so, years later when Scobie had grown and moved away only to be caught up in some crime and sent off to the state penitentiary in Angola, a dreaded place, it broke my grandfather’s heart. For a couple of years Grandpaman, as I called him, went once a month down to the pen to see Scobie. He eventually stopped, my dad said, because it was too painful. Scobie vanished from their lives.

My grandmother even put up with my grandfather’s friend, Blackie, who had stabbed his wife to death over in Waskom, Texas, and had been sent to jail for many years at Sugarland, the Texas state penitentiary. Blackie was a drinking man and, in his company, so was my grandfather, more, my grandmother was certain, than was good for him, so she was glad to see the last of Blackie. For a while, that is, until Grandpaman decided to get Blackie out of prison.

My grandfather at that time was running a small house painting and wallpapering trade; he had a panel truck and some ladders and extension boards and when he got a job, he’d round up his friends and pay them what he could. These were all rough-hewn, angular ex-farmers, piney-woods loggers, and turpentine men, like my grandfather, and like him, they were a taciturn lot, not given to much talk and, except in song from time to time, not much given at all to what you would call verbal play. My memories of my grandfather contain very few words, just pictures. He was about five foot six or seven, thin, and the color of old leather when I first began to really notice him. He was in his fifties then and had been working hard all his life. He, too, seemed to have stepped out of a Farm Bureau photo file. It was if the Depression had locked his generation forever in place, a place that by the early 1950s, no longer existed, a rural America closer to the 19^th century than the 20^th in its memories and its expectations. To visit my grandparents was literally to step back in time, to eat food that “our” people had eaten for generations, to sing the old church songs that carried tired hearts “over Jordan” Sunday after Sunday, to hear stories of logging camps and cotton fields and catfish caught, frogs gigged, horses traded.

I don’t know how long Grandpaman and Blackie had known each other, but Blackie was, Grandpaman claimed in the letter he wrote to the governor of Texas, the best interior trim man he had ever seen and if my grandfather didn’t get him back, the house painting business was going to fall apart. From what I heard from my dad, it was a pretty straightforward letter, about how Blackie had been drinking and had, for sure, stabbed his wife, but those days were gone forever. Apparently my grandfather promised the governor that they would both stop drinking and that my grandfather would see Blackie everyday and give him a job and vouch for his behavior. I can’t believe that that was all there was to it but before long Grandpaman drove over to Sugarland and got Blackie from the prison and brought him back to Shreveport. Now because Blackie was a Texas felon, he couldn’t live out of state, so Grandpaman got him a little house over the line in Waskom and drove over there every morning to get him and bring him into Shreveport for work. Blackie was so beholden to my grandfather that he spent every moment he could with him, took his meals at the house and, much to my grandmother’s irritation, even dressed like him. I’m not sure why this upset her so, but it did. Clearly there was something in the sight of two middle-aged rawbones in identical white shirts buttoned at the collar, paint-spattered overhauls and half-boots, and little grey straw fedoras tilted back on their bald foreheads, sitting on the porch swing after breakfast smoking tailor-mades if they had them, that really irritated her, as I can attest to of many a Sunday morning.

So, if my dad didn’t get his love of fine clothes from his folks, or from his brothers, who pretty much preserved Grandpaman’s sartorial practices as if in amber, I wonder how he came to it. Pictures of my dad in high school don’t suggest much beyond the possible argument that a fellow as good looking as he was probably figured out how to make the best of a good thing. Dad was the best looking of all the Suggs boys but even he didn’t hold a candle to Ruth, the baby and the only girl. She was good looking in that way some have that makes the question of what you have on totally irrelevant to the moment. Dad was handsome but clothes helped him a lot; when he was dressed up, he was pretty impressive. But blonde, blue-eyed Ruth, who did love nice things, was beautiful from the moment she awakened ‘til she fell off to sleep, and then some. Then when she grew older she married a man as beautiful as she was, James. James was six foot two or thereabouts, had black hair, broad shoulders, and blue eyes too. James was a plumber and loved motorcycles and once he and Aunt Ruth rode all the way to Las Vegas and back just for fun. When they came to visit on their Harleys, they always offered me a ride. Dad let me go only once.

It wasn’t that Dad mistrusted motorcycles; interest in them sort of ran in the family. His uncle, the one who went to jail for armed robbery, was known to us all as “Uncle Bootsie” because he wore knee-high lace-up boots to ride his big Indian all over the Ark-La-Tex (that 50 mile circle centered on the point where Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas come together). No, Dad didn’t trust Aunt Ruth. For all her beauty, there was, it turned out, something desperate in her, something that drove her easily over limits. Despite all that James and her brothers and her sons could do, Ruth slid off into self destruction and despair, to prostitution and drug addiction. In her last years her schizophrenia was diagnosed and medication eased her way for a while. Dad and Mom took her in to live with them but at the end, at her own insistence, she lived alone in a motel apartment in Bossier City, where she died.

February 28, 2012

The aged moss, a gentle mist, a dry martini---I wish I had been sophisticated enough to do that, but I was just a college kid, more often than not out of my depth, even when I didn’t realize it. But the quest for sophistication was never-ending in those days, at least for me. I was acutely aware of class, even though I didn’t know how to talk about it. It had something to with style, I was certain. I had learned that from my dad, in whose mind “class” meant “classy;” there was nothing socio-economic about it for him, not even the question of whether he could afford it or not.

My dad loved clothes and cars and nice shoes and he had wonderful taste. He just didn’t have much money and so his version of life as compromise usually meant the problem of paying the rent after the new sport coat had been bought. The worst story I know about him and clothes involves my college money and before I tell it to you, you have to promise to forgive him. I did. I don’t think my mother did, not for a while anyway.

In the summer of 1958 I was getting ready to go off to college. The summer before that, I had served an apprenticeship with my dad in the glass factory. He was forty then, a veteran of the Second World War, who had turned down a commission and the GI Bill’s education benefits to get back to his job in the glass factory. By 1957 he was beginning to feel the consequences of those decisions. The job he had, industrial glass cutting, no longer exists, all the men so employed having long since been replaced by machines. It was a physically hard job and mentally exhausting. It was also dangerous. A glass cutter worked in an open stall roughly ten by eight feet “square.” In front of him was a waist-high table about eight feet long and almost two yards deep, covered in green felt. A rule ran the length of its near and far edges. To start the day carters brought a stack of ten to twenty plate glass sheets, each roughly ninety by forty inches, and stood them on end along the wall of the stall to the right of a right-handed cutter. On the table would be a sheet of paper with the orders for the day. The company might want 100 “lights” of glass 9 x 12 and 50  of 10x14 and so on. The cutter’s job was to extract from the raw sheets the sizes and quantities of the order. Besides the obvious visual imagination called for, the job required a kind of judgment that only experience could provide: each sheet of raw glass was flawed by stones left unmelted in the furnaces and blisters caused by an uneven draw. The cutter had to find those specific lights around and between the blisters and stones pitting the glass he was given. A very small stone here or one blister there might pass but the inspector, who came around regularly throughout the day, could reject some or all of a pack of ten lights, a fate called “rammycacking.” Since the cutter was paid on a piecework basis, he could ill afford a half-morning’s work thrown into the scrap bin at the left of his stall to be taken back to the furnaces and melted down.

This mental strain, the constant demands of instinct and judgment, was made more burdensome by the physical strain.  Glass is heavy and a sheet of glass 90 by 40 is very heavy. The cutter would turn to his right, facing the stacked glass and take one sheet in his hands, about halfway up its length. He would lift the sheet and turn to face the table, the glass between him and the table edge. He would then turn the sheet ninety degrees to the right so that his hands were at the top and bottom of the now horizontal sheet. Lifting with his bottom hand, his right, and loosening the fingers of his left hand at the top of the sheet, he would then flip the sheet of glass into the air ever so slightly so that it would fall exactly flat on the felt top of the table. From there he could begin to cut.

Most cutters were wounded men. Everyone I knew had scars on their hands, faces, or arms. Some has lost an eye, a finger or two, a couple of toes. There was safety equipment but not everyone wore it and in my father’s day men of the generation prior to his had worked without much gear at all, through the Depression and the war and some even before that. The trade had come to America in the late 19^th century with Belgian glass makers and most older cutters had names like Desire and Hermes and LaBenne. Since this was a guild trade, most entered by serving apprenticeships with their fathers or brothers or uncles. A few, like my father, had been “adopted” by single men with no families. The man who took my father in had lost a hand to the glass and worked with a two-fingered metal claw that was fitted with rubber tips. A safety-conscious cutter wore a thick leather apron that covered him from his chest to just below his knees. He wore steel-toed work shoes, thick leather gloves, and padded cotton sleeves set with steel grommets that reached and covered his shoulders. Most wore a cap of some kind. You can imagine how hot this outfit was in the summertime. That we lived in Louisiana that summer made it even worse. That is why some of the younger cutters worked stark naked beneath the equipment. Walking down the workroom past the stalls where the men faced their tables and turned their backs on the world was quite an experience.

Once the cutter faced the glass on the table, the game was on. The cutting tool was an industrial diamond set to the precise angle in the tip of a cartridge held in a beveling clamp at the end of a small rod. The length of the rod and the swiveling clamp allowed the cutter to set the right attitude of his draw down the glass, from the far edge of the table toward him at the near edge. And so it went, for eight hours a day: lift, turn, turn, flip, measure, cut, pray for the best. Radios played, men sang, told jokes and stories, cursed the inspector. This was the world I wanted to enter.

It took some arguing on my part to convince my father to take me on, as he had done both his younger brothers in the past, but many of the sons of my father’s friends were starting, boys I knew from high school and from years of company softball games and picnics. It was almost a rite of passage, I suppose. My father eventually gave in and one morning in June of 1957, union card in my pocket, badge on my ball cap, apprenticeship book in hand, I walked with my father through the factory gates. I have to tell you that I loved it, for all the boyish-mannish reasons you can think of. I loved watching my father work. He was a patient teacher by example and instruction. He was well-thought of by his comrades and moved with ease through the factory. We sweated through the summer together and as school approached I asked him how the apprenticeship worked in the school year. Only then did he tell me that I would not be coming back. He had let me work with him because he knew it was necessary for my growing up, but he said it was not necessary that he deceive me. He told me that he knew I thought glass cutting was a good job but he wanted me to know that it was not.  Piece work pay for a dangerous job was the worst kind of life. The job was seasonal, as well, a fact that I had understood as we moved around the country year after year, from factory to factory, chasing open furnaces and unfilled orders, but I had no idea what that meant financially, he said. I remembered nights we had slipped out of town a car length ahead of the landlord—or the sheriff, probably. There had been a few flush periods, a few months at a time. Once we had owned a house, but once we had lived in a three-room shack with no hot water and a bathroom shared with the people next door. I don’t know if my father thought of himself as a happy man, a fortunate man. He seemed so to me. But by many measures his life was hard and worrisome and unrewarding. Whatever was the case, he did not want any of it for me. “You’re going to college,” he said.

So, you can see that that next summer, of ’58, was as much the end of something for my father as it was a beginning for me. Even if he didn’t understand “class” the way Marx or Veblen did, I think he knew that something fundamental was changing in our lives. It was as if our roles had suddenly reversed. Growing up I followed him, or wanted to, everywhere. He sang, I sang; he played sports, I played sports; he told stories, I told stories; he cut glass, I cut glass. Whatever he did, I tried; whatever he loved, I loved. Then, there we were at that fork in the road, the one boys and their dads come to. It wasn’t just that we had to go in different directions; it was harsher than that. He would continue up a road that I was no longer allowed to travel, the one he had come up, had ushered his brothers along, shared with other men and boys. I had to watch him go on without me, to wonder if he would miss me.

Then again, he couldn’t come with me, either. Truth be told, I didn’t want him along; I was ready to go by then, hungry for more books and ideas. I wasn’t embarrassed by him or angry at him; I was just becoming aware that I was not him; not any more (I was wrong, of course, but that insight was several decades in coming.) In turn, he had to watch me go along a way he only vaguely understood, into a world the superficial dimensions of which he glimpsed but whose particulars were invisible to him. It had been he who insisted I had to go there but I am not sure he understood, as I certainly didn’t, how separate the two roads would be. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mean we were estranged or unable to talk to one another or disaffected this way or that, but that summer it became clearer and clearer that each of us was being left behind. For me, it was a time of promise and I was a little scared and a little self absorbed. Maybe with a bit of distance from my own excitement I might have seen what was happening to my dad, but I was only seventeen, so I’ll let myself off the hook. Even now I can only imagine what he was feeling. So, I was surprised when it happened, and bewildered.

February 27, 2012

There was an email/post/blogpoint going around for a while that captured the essence of the Culture Wars. It purported to be a history of the world in the telling of which “conservatives” had done or invented everything of value and “liberals” had contributed only the irrelevant or the exploitive. When it first appeared, many “liberals” tried to argue with it, point by point, saying, “No, we didn’t!” But there is no point arguing with satire. I mean, one can just state the truth and hope for the best. For instance:

World History 101

Humans originally existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunters/gatherers. They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer and would go to the coast and live on fish and lobster in the winter.

The two most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer. These were the foundation of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into two distinct subgroups:

1. Liberals, and

2. Conservatives.

Once beer was discovered, it required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can were invented yet, so while our early humans were sitting around waiting for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the brewery. That's how villages were formed.

Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to B-B-Q at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as the Conservative movement. To wit, after drinking a lot of beer and eating a lot of meat, many men would pass out or throw up and then pass out. When they woke up, many found that other men had taken their stuff and run off with their women. So, they founded "Conservatism," a movement to conserve what they had got while they drank and passed out. "Property" became the foundation of this movement--what I have is my property and must be conserved. What you have is potentially my property and when I get it from you, it must be conserved as mine, especially if I got it while you were drunk and passed out.

Other men, who had stronger stomachs and were better drinkers (as evidenced by their rapid evolution from relatively weak beer, which even at 3.2% has the capacity to render Conservatives stupidly drunk within minutes, to wines and Scotch whiskies, neat), realized that by offering enough beer and a warm place to lay down, they could get the Conservatives to bring all the meat to a central place. Then, while the Conservatives drank beer, threw up, and passed out, these guys made lists of the poor and ill and defenseless and made sure that they got their share of the meat in return for doing the sewing, fetching, and hair dressing that so fascinated the Conservatives when they were awake and/or sober. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement.

Some noteworthy Liberal achievements include the domestication of Conservatives, the invention of the individual, face-to-face sex, and the concept of Democratic voting to decide how to divide the meat and beer that Conservatives provided.

Over the years Conservatives came to be symbolized by the largest, most destructive land animal on earth, the elephant. Liberals are symbolized by the mule, the animal whose ability to pull the plow that broke the plains so grain could be planted and more beer could be brewed and civilization ensured, has been enshrined in the literature and art of the ages, including a magnificent series of films.

Modern Liberals avoid beer so as not to be confused by their French friends with Conservatives but will, if pressed, sip an imported beer (with lime added). They eat raw fish but like their beef well done and in very small portions called "medallions" (Conservatives prefer meat to come in slabs; most Conservatives are overweight, have high blood pressure, and die young, which is what makes them so testy; advocating a life style that provably leads to the premature extinction of your own kind is intellectually hard to reconcile). Liberals also like sushi, tofu, and French food including lots of red wine and are invariably slender, well-groomed and live very long happy lives with many serial wives and mistresses. Another interesting evolutionary side note: most Liberals have much higher testosterone levels than Conservatives as evidenced by the higher incidence of baldness among Liberals and African American basketball players. Most social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists, dreamers in Hollywood and group therapists are Liberals. Liberals invented the rule that a fly ball behind third base belongs to the shortstop to prevent Conservative infielders from injuring themselves and losing the game in the last of the ninth.

Conservatives drink domestic beer, mostly Bud or Miller Lite. They eat red meat and still provide for their women. Conservatives are big-game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers, firemen, medical doctors, police officers, corporate executives, white athletes, members of the military, airline pilots and generally anyone who works productively. Conservatives who own companies hire other Conservatives who, not being Liberals and so, not having careers but needing jobs, have to work for a living, and they pay them as little as they can, thus "conserving" their own wealth.

As much as Liberals would like to spend their time producing stuff, they realize that making it is only half the battle, so they take on the thankless task of governing the producers and deciding what to do with the production. Otherwise, while the Conservative producers, having drank, thrown, up, and passed out, were unconscious, other guys would come steal their stuff.

Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans and so work very hard to protect their Conservative friends from Europeans. It is this impulse to protect their Conservative friends that constitutes the basic weakness of Liberals, since Conservatives seem to have little more on their minds than the absolute eradication of Liberals from the earth and their embedded-ness in Hell (which, by the way, is also another Conservative invention worthy of notice; see, for example Alighieri, Dante and Santorum, Rick) or in Europe, not really part of Earth, actually.

Finally, this note: because Conservatives privilege action (or speech; the US Supreme Court says they are the same, which is why donations of millions of dollars from rich white men to Conservatives is not unconstitutional; what looks like an action is really a speech) before thought, it is hard to know what Conservatives really think, or if they do. One can only watch their actions. In fact, if you are in the presence of Conservatives, it is always good to watch their actions---and your back.