Edisto Revisited

by Padgett Powell

  Their pride in pride is oppressive, cheerless, unlaughable. Something in you wants to film it, but something else wants a robot to run the camera for you while you … change your name and go somewhere else.

  So Texas I abandoned, the prospect of being a historically in-tune, enviro-friendly, twill-clad, post-and-beam architect no longer troublesome. That’s what I thought to do, so in Atlanta I stopped to interview with the other guys, in order to decline the opportunity to join them and be a historically out-of-tune, enviro-blind, twill-clad, skin-and-skeleton architect. The interview was thorough. Four of the not senior fellows took me out, they could drink, we wound up after hours looking for an open club, we found one, it was gay, we ordered up, and I am greeted heartily by the General—the president of the small college in which my mother teaches.

  He says, taking me by the shoulder as if to lead me somewhere and show me off, “Whoa! Whoa! I didn’t know!” He’s the picture of mirth—country-club camaraderie and thigh-slapping. What on earth do you make of this earth? A man who has hounded friends of my mother out of jobs for their alleged homosexuality—on the strength of seeing me, recognizing me from not much more than a few conversations with my mother, with me at her side, years ago—feeling me, kneading me, steering me through a hundred leering, winking guys who know a bit more than I do, it would seem, about him. I start laughing and find no way not to go along with the General’s presumptions and gumption. There are raised eyebrows at the bar where my interviewers are suspended, not yet tasting their drinks, wondering now how good an idea coming with hot young prospect Simons Manigault into a place called the Golden Flame was.

  17

  THERE, IN A GAY BAR, at one in the morning, being watched by my red-blooded interviewers with their eyebrows irrepressibly raised as the college president for whom my mother teaches paws me, I have a vision of sorts. It is of the lover of my mother whom I called Taurus, who was ostensibly not a white man altogether, who went apparently to Louisiana when he was done with my mother or when she was done with him. I have left enough women to know that the matter is never clear: even if one party drops off the key, Lee, and the other merely weeps, there has been some crossfire, however muted, and there has been some leveraging out on the part of the left. But at one in the morning in the Golden Flame, I see only my man Taurus, sitting in a bar, a different kind of bar, with knotty paneling and room for only ten or so serious fools, in Louisiana, with a bright yellow fizzing beer in a six-ounce straight glass and an expression on his face that is inscrutable. And I am going to Louisiana. Where I have no business, but I have no business with the General’s ham-sized paw kneading my shoulder and forcing me, eventually, to go back to my escorts and feign sheepishness and explain this. No. When I get this vision of Taurus, a man singular in the long unsingular run of suitors to my own mother, I have the courage to walk back to the T-square technicians who call themselves artists and ask, “Gentlemen, you fellows ever tried the true stuff?” They freeze—not able even to blush, let alone snort. “Until you do, it cannot be explained.”

  I know it will be explained at the office the next morning, in high hilarity and close-call head-shaking sighs. Their discomfort is marginally amusing. Not amusing enough. The General, in his large, loose presumption, is better company than this small, tight presumption of the professionally-taking-itself-seriously.

  I spend a night in a giant glass tower of the sort they would have me draw for a living and observe from my window, at intervals, the construction of a receiving awning and the cordoning off of a two-block area by a profusion of at least three kinds of police. Checking out the next morning, I learn that the President is coming for a stay. May he be gay, too.

  I stop around the corner at a liquor store—I do not mean to go into Louisiana unarmed—and witness what I take to be a scene, but the players don’t apparently regard it as much. A black man stumbles into the store and is denied a purchase—I miss whether he has no money or whether he has been deemed too drunk to buy more booze. As this denial obtains in his brain, he begins to huff and rumble, finally managing something like, directed at the black clerk, “Fuck you up.” The clerk says, “Go on.”

  “Bsht!” A stagger and a wave that is then, from its momentum only, known to have been a swing at the clerk.

  “Get out of here.”

  “Fuck you up!”

  “I’mone tear you up, nigger,” the clerk says, untying his apron.

  That does it. The denied eases out, bumping from jamb to jamb, and the store is back to business as usual. I notice that I am the only customer among five who is white and who has been holding his breath. The others have formed a line ahead of me with their purchases, impatient. I watch the clerk scrupulously to see if he regards me or my transaction any differently from the others, and he does not. Where I come from there would have been apology or dismissal, explanation or gesture made to accommodate me, to persuade me the drunk and the vulgarity were exceptional. Or during the fracas, the clerk might say “Buckra heah.” Here, no. Atlanta is on its own, I take it, racially, and it is the only thing I witness in it that argues I stay. But I do not stay: they are already goosing each other about me in the suites of Eco, Ergo and Ague, and I am going to Louisiana with a banjo on my knee.

  Do I expect to find this man? Why, excepting that it is absurd to do so, should I not? Have I not seen my careerist peers panicked by prospect of homosexual contagion, my non-careerist non-peers not panicked by prospect of physical violence, my President panicked by prospect of assassination, when all he wants is a quiet room at the Omni? Is it more absurd to think to find one mysterious man who, as I recall him, was not panicked by anything, in half a million panicked men in Louisiana? Not absurd enough.

  I drive a long time. If you prefer old federal highways that are drained of blood by parallel interstates, they are happily drained also of asphalt, and you click and clunk and click down them slowly enough to study the shells and hulls of cinder-block motels and bars clinging to them like cicada husks to moribund trees. I wind up in desolate region in desolate hour, with no motel in sight, and then finally there is one. The breath I hold against No Vacancy turns out to be fanciful when the clerk, a black woman, chuckles, “Sure there’s room,” and I wish immediately maybe there had not been. There are about ten rooms, with most of the doors open at one in the morning and couples in them managing to look at me, led by my key to No. 8. They are all black. The looks are bothered, not uncivil, but containing curiosity run over quickly by resentment. Resenting what, I no longer am naïve enough to wonder. Nor do I wonder how I graduate from the black liquor store and its business to this black whorehouse (as near as I can hazard) with its business—you get in grooves in life, and you by God stay in them until the record plays out. So be it. What I do wonder is why so many doors are open for them to see me, as if each couple is expecting more company, if it is actually couples in the rooms (you have, with your circumspect glance as you watch ostensibly your own feet, time to see only a drink or a bottle, a man or a woman, a hand, a look, an earring, a mustache, another look). I close the door to my room. A card on the table says “Latesha,” like that, in quotes, and then, also in quotes, a phone number.

  I call my mother. She’s asleep. Otherwise she would not cooperate.

  “Mother.”

  “Son.”

  “That man I called Taurus, your …”

  “My friend.”

  “Yes. Where is he?”

  “Where is he?”

  “Yes.” I expect her to disclaim, fight, dodge, vituper possibly. The interview of one’s mother on the subject of her lovers is not indelicate. My timing—her being nine-parts asleep (agreeable) and one part her true self—allows purchase.

  “Where he is, oh. He’s … you did call him Taurus.” She giggles.

  “You all let me.”

  “If you’d called him Aquarius, we’d have stopped that.” She outright laughs, as if this is much funnier than it is: she is laughing at something else. What,
I can’t fathom, and it may have to do with how much (or little—this, too, you never know) she’s had to drink tonight.

  “Well, where is this raging bull, Mother?”

  “That’s a laidlow to—”

  “No, Mother, it’s not. It’s a question.”

  I swear to God I hear all the motel doors close and the couples are already moaning. Black sexual moaning sounds like white medical trauma. There is a back room at the Grand I spent some childhood under. “It’s a question, Mother. I want to know where Taurus, stud, is.”

  “He’s a game warden in Ville Platte, Louisiana.”

  “How did I know he was in Louisiana?”

  “Honey, I hardly know how I know he’s in Louisiana.”

  “He’s a game warden?”

  “He’s straddling law and law enforcement,” she says. “That’s his … game.”

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I don’t?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you think you’re smart, but you’re people dumb.”

  “I’m people dumb?”

  “Eat up with it.”

  “He’s your ex-lover, not mine,” I say, wild. There are knocking sounds in deep muffle through the wall to No. 9, into which I did not get a glimpse. I move away from the wall, looking at the floor, expecting to see something leaking through. I get the creeps, but I’m in a domestic engagement. My mother is pulling a partial rear enfilade on the phone. “Your lover grandson to your stroked-out maid, Mother, if I recall correctly.”

  “People dumb,” she says, and there is a sound with it that suggests she may be crying, and I hang up. I am crying, too. May the world excuse me. I will not cry over, or with, or for my mother again.

  People dumb. She’s right, of course. But what a brutal thing to say. If nothing else, I can live and die and say when it is over, Yes, I came to nothing, but my mother, my mother was a pro.

  18

  LOUISIANA WAS A TUNNEL OF improbability. For starters, I could not stop drinking. This, I know, is statistically not improbable if you are bred for it, if you have in your soul the Mendelian, green, wrinkled pea for booze, and I indubitably do, but I had never felt the real pull of it before. Booze has been for me recreation, sideboard theater, camp, a headache. Occasionally, insupportable behavior. Occasionally, magical moments.

  But crossing into Louisiana I got this haunted little rill of feeling—there was moss and mud everywhere and an inexplicable, hollow sensation that Louisiana is what would be left of the South after it has been nuked—that I and everything around me were irretrievably rotten. I was passing through this rotten-looking, rotten-sounding town called Slidell and I got some crayfish and ate them with mustard. Pygmy lobsters from the swamp and Zatarain’s mustard from the jar and some kind of sharp whiskey from the bottle, which had the effect of Cowper’s fluid on the crustaceans and mustard going down; I could swear the little things were snapping their tails in what felt like gasoline in my throat, and I felt so bad and out of it—no job, no friends, no Henry Miller—that I felt very, very, very good. I felt like boxing a few rounds with … with live oaks. I felt like driving. And that I did. Somewhere right at the beginning I stopped and asked someone, “Is this Slidell?” and before he could answer yelled, “I am Slidell,” and drove very slowly away, waving and smiling a huge exaggerated smile at him, or her, it may have been a dog.

  I wanted to be black and named Slidell Washington. I had whiskey. I passed Mandeville, which I knew somehow was the premier state nuthouse, and stepped on it hard. I came to in a bar.

  There, relatively calm, I realized Mandeville was maybe where they shanghaied Earl Long, but I was too near it yet and scared by being Slidell Washington to ask anyone. If I were black and asked about Mandeville and Earl Long they would just put me in Mandeville. I had a drink before me on the bar, and there was a very attractive unattractive lifer barmaid smoking down the way who had served me the drink, apparently. I went to the bathroom to see if I was black, and was not. I washed my face anyway, convinced I was. I didn’t mind that actually—the idea of being secretly black was agreeable. But I didn’t want anyone finding out, or finding out suddenly and scaring everyone and me, too. This is where a drink works like an oar on a boat in a moving current. You have one, you need another to row, to control, because shit is happening.

  I went out to the bar, sat down to address my drink, and a very loud noise occurred. And apparently only I heard it. When I got up out of the crouch I was in beside my stool, the bartender was looking at me.

  “You okay?” she said.

  I knew immediately she had not heard the noise. She could not possibly have heard it and still be upright, smoking. But I had to say, anyway, “You didn’t hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “That, ah, explosion?”

  She just looked at me. I had enough instinct still to know if I said one more word I’d not get one more drink from her.

  “Sorry, ma’am. Flashback city.”

  She was not reassured by this, because I do not look flashback qualified, unless we are talking drug flashback, but I averted crossing the cutoff line, and I drank the drink before me and got another as quickly as I could and tipped her well right then, with more money visible on the bar—that wordless, grave tipping you do by pushing the money solemnly at them, interrupting their retreat, even touching her hand if you’re really up to something other than ensuring service during your first serious drunk. I was swimming in ordure. I was having promiscuous thoughts—not ribald thoughts, but thoughts that were changing among themselves in a blurred and indiscriminate fashion. I was drunk and it felt good in a way I knew was not good. I had the wit to keep all this to myself and keep getting drinks and never figured out the huge noise. From matchbooks I figured out I was in Covington, probably.

  I had a scratch on my arm and didn’t know how I’d scratched it. The noise I’d heard seemed to be coming from it, a little at a time. I looked to the woman to see if she heard that. She mistook my glance for a ready sign and made me a drink. Whatever she was making me had changed color. My arm was now speaking.

  It said, “Shut up.”

  “Okay,” I said to it.

  “You’re welcome,” the bartender said.

  “Your mother,” my arm said.

  I waited for more. “My mother what?”

  “I don’t know,” it said.

  I looked at the scratch closely. I wanted to see its lips move if I could. I put my head on my arm, level with the forest of hairs, the wild terrain of follicle and freckle and fleshy soil, waiting for this fresh fault in the land to speak. I bit myself, at first rather affectionately, then shook my arm like a bulldog a rag and made noises. “Your mother’s on the phone,” it said. I dropped my arm.

  “What?”

  The bartender was over us. “Your mother—she says—is on the phone.”

  “My mother is on the phone?”

  “That’s what she says. It’s a woman. You called her, I think. Before.”

  That is as close to a summary position on the evils of drink as I can imagine: Don’t drink, because if you do and it gets off the road with you, you can be invited to speak to your mother in a bar you do not know the location of on a phone it is alleged, but you do not remember, you have used. It is like a call to armed combat when you are unaware you’re in the service. Flat feet understates the matter; 4-F will not at this hour suffice. You trudge, you limp, you lollygag to the phone, and, with a look and high sign for a drink to the bartender, who’s rather your commanding officer at the moment, you pick up the phone.

  “I did it,” she says.

  “Did what?”

  “Called him.”

  “Who?”

  “What’s with you, Son?”

  “Nothing’s with me.”

  “Something’s with you.”

  “Ty-D-Bol.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”
<
br />   “O.K. Bar Number Two, Mamou.”

  “Tokyo tumbler egg foo, to you.”

  “Son, you asked me to find him, I did.”

  I had no idea—well, some idea, but wasn’t happy about my disadvantages. The best thing to do was bluff, so I got her to repeat the information and got off the phone. It was a wall phone and somehow I nearly fell down hanging up, and would have had I missed the cradle. I straightened up and did not feel as drunk as I had, and I had a reasonable guess that this information regarded the man-myth Taurus, and that I’d called my mother during the deep passion storm of the early rising part of the drunk. I was in the late used-rag part now, where passion is an old fond friend you wish well. You trust he’s well but would be content never to see him again. But here I’d gone and made a date during the friskies. Mamou.

  I sat back down and the bartender came over with a drink and swept the money out of the way and leaned over the bar with both arms—as if to straighten my tie, which I was not wearing—her hands coming in tenderly and slowly at my throat and sliding around my neck and lacing behind it, and she pulled me to her, hard, and kissed me, hard, full on the mouth, and turned her head forty-five degrees, serious. It was done with such energy I gave her energy back, and tried to give back what seemed the spirit of the thing. It’s just a kiss, do it well, she seemed to be saying. She let me go and I rocked back down on the four legs of the stool.

  “Not bad,” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  She went back to her station and didn’t regard me much after that; some regulars came in and I knew we were over. It was an agreeable affair. Her hair—I grabbed her neck, too—was like bleached hemp, almost as coarse and stiff as shredded wheat, and felt very sturdy and good to the hands but nothing like hair. People were calling her Dotty.

  By way of saying goodbye, I told her, over some of the regulars, which made me look nuttier than anything I’d done in there yet, I think, “Hey, Dotty, I’ve got to go. I’ve got a dog to feed.” It was as if I were Admiral Byrd saying, “Hey, I’ve got to go. I’ve got a pole to claim.” I said this to a group of explorers who had not yet begun their journeys. The entire bar paused and did a very discreet but palpable eye roll, except Dotty, who managed, unseen by anyone, to wink at me. It was the wink of one-kiss lovers, a salutation across all time between two people forever in love who had strained to do something mystifying to each other across a countertop. “Well,” I said when the eye roll had completed itself and I felt they were all embarrassed to have presumed Dotty would join them, and I wanted to say Hi-yo, Silver! as well, but did not, and left.