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.