1969 and Then Some

by Robert Wintner

  Jim Morrison was still rocking out and would continue for another year. But I didn’t do needles, didn’t want to and in fact couldn’t watch without the dizzies. Besides that, I couldn’t handle downers. I once tried a red Mike Dunn gave me. He stole them from his mother, who had full bottles and didn’t miss a few. He popped two and advised the same dosage, because one Seconal wouldn’t get it. I told him I’d try one and then take another in a while, as necessary. The one turned my legs to jelly, then my hips, torso, arms, eyes, brain and so on. I eased back in the grass, paralyzed, and got up six hours later with severe sunburn and a hammering headache. Mike asked, “Cool, huh? You want another?”

  “No, thanks. I think I’ll cut back for now.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. I’m sure.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Okay.”

  Meanwhile, Jimmy waited for my reaction—my amazement and admiration—but all I could muster was my one go with reds, or rather with a red. So I nodded slowly and said, “Hitting Tuinals. That’ll be like . . . jumping off a cliff.”

  “Yeah, man. That’s good, because it’s downers. I mean it’s all like a big cliff with anything you hit, but like with downers, you jump off and keep on, you know, going down.”

  “Yeah,” I said, though I didn’t know. This was years before bungee jumping, so I didn’t imagine springing back. I only saw a nosedive at terminal velocity.

  “You like downers?”

  I shrugged. “I couldn’t ever get into downers.”

  “Yeah,” he said, turning back to the last of the cereal.

  “Well, I gotta go. See you, Jimmy.”

  He nodded, slurping, but he called out when I was at the door. “Hey, man. I’ll let you know how it went.”

  “Yeah.”

  Dead by the weekend, Jimmy let everyone know how it went. Nobody could be too surprised, but death is always a surprise, even as it seems foregone. Sadness filled the airwaves as old friends called with the news. Jimmy dominated thoughts till the first notes of his mother’s lament, stock audio from the bereaved parents file: “Such a waste!” Jeanette and Harold had been oblivious for years that Jimmy got wasted long ago. Denial compounded in her claim that Jimmy was about to join ranks with the Doctahs of the world; or maybe the Lawyahs—an Accountant wouldn’t be so bad. Blind to Jimmy’s hunger for pharmacopoeia and blind to his emaciation after six years as a speed-freak junkie dabbling in downers, Jeanette had spent those years effervescing. She’d believed that Jimmy would snap out of it and go to his room for a nice club tie and a Brooks Brothers shirt. Then he’d marry a nice Jewish girl and begin a family. And why not, Mr. Smarty Pants?

  WWJD? What Would Jimmy Do? Or say? Harold and Jeanette Levin died within a month of each other some years later from old age and broken hearts—what Jimmy would have called their usual routine. Harold was quiet, not so much unthinking but tuned out—like Jimmy but with nothing else to tune into. Jeanette babbled to the end, her blue bouffant and oversized costume jewelry sticking her in time like an old joke.

  Jimmy would have summarized their life and demise in a unique blend of cold compassion and liberal understanding: Yeah. That’s cool. They never were really, you know, into much.

  Jimmy’s obituary came as another clipping in an envelope from Mom. It called him a college student and loving son, survived by his parents Harold and Jeanette Levin of dry goods fame and longstanding philanthropic support of Jewish causes in Israel and the Jewish Country Club—not the upper-middle class reachers and schnorrers but the real hoi polloi club with the old money and solid sterling silver and Lincolns, not Cadillacs, just like the goyem. In the margin I wrote: Your son is making out like a bandit, considering how Jimmy Levin had all the breaks.

  I sent it back to Old Mom, and she agreed that it just goes to show you. She moaned and remembered: What you had to go through. Parental kvetching gained depth in the 60s with far more pitfalls for tender youth, what with the drugs, the war and loose shiksas.

  What if the 60s Never Happened?

  The South Fork

  TIM LITTLETON WAS forty-one already and a real businessman, homey as Burl Ives with the folksy goatee, and he was fat, warm and humorous as a Burl Ives song. He tipped me off one day that the Savannah paper wanted coverage on our little island corner of South Carolina—not a stringer but a staffer. “Every New York news hound’ll be on it, once they find out. Cold, miserable bastards.” I got the job.

  Savannah journalism was who, what, when, where and the facts with no style, no flourish and no irony. Who the fuck you think you are, bubba? We don’t need that shit. Making slightly less money than rent and groceries, two years felt like a long time. Seeing prime time fade away, it was time to take a stand, time for a novel—time for a labor of love with no check on Friday. Time for the saving grace—and poverty, just add water.

  Nobody quits art. Art is set aside for practical reasons. Then art fades away, sometimes. I stayed friends with Tim Littleton because he understood artistic aspirations, and because he gave me work, writing a monthly article for the Chamber of Commerce magazine he’d edited. My special coed had put up with an attic apartment in mid-Missouri, with subsistence living in Miami on stolen fruit and menial jobs—with artistic delusions and a low budget oyster roast billed as a wedding in our South Carolina back yard. We’d moved up the coast a hundred miles to Charleston, where a fellow stood far better prospects for revenue than on a resort island.

  Hot mud was still laughable, even as a fossil remnant of a long gone age. Still, how tough could real business be? Businessmen didn’t do shit—anybody could see that. They hired out the work.

  This conclusion followed the data; on learning that the city magazine in Charleston would not be a source of income, because there weren’t no city magazine. But a city with no magazine would want one. So it was settled by virtue of logic, free will and flight of fancy in a package deal that felt like a legacy.

  City magazines were new and Charleston, South Carolina was picture perfect, a still-life of lovely bones marinated in scotch whiskey, bound to history, inured to innovation and obsessed on non-identity and chronic regret over the Great Misfortune, meaning the Civil War. Who gave a shit? Charleston was the town that time forgot, especially the 60s—that would be the nineteen 60s.

  Always friendly and eager to meet new, white people, the place welcomed with strange, warm greetings. Yenna? How you do-een. Whatcho fittin’ a do? The upper crust defined itself in khaki pants, Weejuns and blue oxford cloth shirts with button-down collars. The uniform uniformity indicated social status and defended against devilish influence from yonder, meaning the world outside the city limits. Egalitarian charm transcended social strata, as in the most frequently asked question around noon. Jeatchet? (Have you as yet engaged in luncheon?)

  Ah, the beauty of it all—a young man with gusto could ease in and make money on a one-horse burg in a pickle jar that loved seeing itself in a mirror and didn’t mind a few mixed metaphors if they shone with pride and commitment to fight on and have another drink. A hippie in Caucasian clothing could take solace in the vast marshland rich with oyster beds and fishing holes.

  With no city magazine, Charleston, Souse Cahlina could cash in on some natural born skills perhaps, uh, new to the area.

  Capitalization would be a cakewalk. We already had a writer and editor, and a crew cobbled itself together on a concept. Things rounded out on a partnership with a graphic artist, a printer and a salesman for the advertising. The product would be a thing of beauty and influence. Tim Littleton would drive a hundred miles up the coast to run the business side. Laid off and grateful for the quid pro quo, Tim confided that he was a 60s veteran at heart and loved wild stuff and had the know how to squeeze a dollar from a sumbitch. Alas, Tim had no squeeze. Worse yet, we met for breakfast.

  Tim ordered the Lowcountry Marsh Wallow Supreme: three over easy, biscuits, grits ’n gravy, ham, links, sausage, toast and jelly. Juice and coffee were extra, but w
hat in a hail you fittin’ a do, eatcher breakfast w’out some? Tim didn’t get so big for nothing, and he tore into the glop as I reviewed our needs. I tipped in at one thirty-five and got the usual: two over easy, grits and toast, hold the gravy and pig meat—and the juice and coffee; I had mine at home. Why not? We’re trying to start a bidness here.

  It’s not much different, two over easy or three, but Tim got three because the extra egg was only ten cents more, and you cain’t be ignorin’ the bargains like that in this day and age. His breakfast ran six bucks and mine was two.

  He never ate the third egg, and self-constraint is admirable; he was so fat, and everybody likes to see fat people cutting back. But he woofed his biscuits, two eggs and all his grits and pig meat and half his toast before rummaging his crumpled pack of Salem 100’s for that first delicious puff of smoke right after eggs and grits and gravy. He inhaled big and turned our little space into a smoke out in menthol, what Salem called a breath of springtime.

  Some people feel discomfort around fat people—not me. Tim was a friend in need and a partner. It got worse when he smoked his menthol 100 down by 50, then stabbed his third yolk with it, swirled it around to dead-out and dredged some grits ‘n gravy residue for the lay down. I loved the action conceptually but couldn’t stomach the ringside view.

  We moved on to meet with the other partners to compare notes and develop ideas. I counted on Tim to keep us on course, but he nodded to every suggestion or demand on the table, and I doubted all those ideas could be good. I finally said, “Wait a minute.”

  Questioning the process became a personal transition, discovering the means by which we would throw off the yolk of the 50s. I mean yoke. This felt foreign to all experience, against the grain and clearly demonstrating that everything was not everything. Nor was it cool. We had a shot at making rent and groceries without manual labor and could not fuck it up on wrong moves—alas, one mo time. A proven radical took to business like Br’er Rabbit in a briar patch. Who knew? It wasn’t a cop out. We hadn’t made any real money and never would.

  Besides that, magazine content went radical. Lively minds through history have felt repressed by stagnant values and fake morality. One department of the new magazine had the catchy title Lowcountry Kitchen, where doyennes of grace and hospitality shared precious family receipts, leading to paid advertising by the doyennes’ husbands’ businesses. Recipes were called receipts, a Huguenot colloquialism indicating original blood if not original thought. Yes, that department was a cop out to the regional delusion, but redemption came in April—get it? April? It was time for a joke, for chrissake! Unfortunately, nobody laughed at the featured receipt, Toadfish Manigault. The Manigault (man•ih•go) family was landed with 17th Century antecedents who Did. Not. Need. Yankee disrespect on a venerable institution. Toadfish were scorned—and left gasping on the dock as punishment for stealing bait and being ugly. Toadfish Manigault was a three-pounder on a bed of noodles presented by a disturbed young man with a curlicue moustache drawn on his face. The Manigault family did not buy an ad ever again. Blowfish bouillabaisse as a side dish didn’t help.

  Ah, well, the goof gods need offerings too. The business stayed afloat by sleight of hand and constant bailing. Eyebrows arched, but they rose on anything that hadn’t sought approval.

  Old Mom sent a clipping about a fat kid who went to the same high school. Burdened by intellectual self-awareness and a neurotic mother who’d divorced three times at around a million per, the kid got a job in New York. That was the news, and who could be surprised with all the breaks he’d had? I told her that life wasn’t so bad in the catbird seat in a lovely coastal burg with good fishing, and I had natural business skill. Where did that come from?

  “Oh, your father wasn’t stupid.”

  It wasn’t work but a spirit engaged, what the 60s had promised. Harking back to greatness of singular character, I bought a Norton Commando, priced to sell with an Atlas front end. Seven years without a two-wheeler felt curable. But who would put an Atlas front end on a Commando?

  A guy who wrecked his motorcycle and got a deal on an Atlas front end is who. How dumb and distracted of me; I didn’t even ask about the goofy front end. Ah, well, it was Norton at last. Call it luck or faith in a muse confirmed. That Norton cruised up and down the Lowcountry coast and inland to the Red Hills, crisscrossing many miles to freedom restored. Reunited, we winged over marshland causeways like one more loon or mallard with a mind of our own.

  Many people said they loved the city magazine because of what it could record, which was so important, lest we forget. Lip service was plentiful on beauty and execution. But a provincially sodden backwater will often muster pleasantries as an outlander sinks in the pluff mud. The magazine cost more than it made. I rode more miles, because the open road felt more like home, a place of solace in movement.

  South Carolina is cracker country with a few twists. It’s where Strom Thurmond mounted his presidential campaign as a Dixiecrat and mounted his . . . er . . . uh . . . Negro housekeeper too. History oozes out of South Carolina. A motorcycle is timeless, oblivious to society or history. It gave meaning to a soul in flight.

  The magazine, like any holdover exhibit, ended. The little town settled back to how it was, which felt, alas, like it wasn’t.

  Many marriages ended naturally in the 70s, so it seems harsh to call them failed, especially when they only gave in to practicality. Starvation, foreclosure and waning prospects were the downside of for better or worse, and things got worser and worser. Marriage based on ideals and the love all around us among twenty-somethings did not often last to thirty something. Looking back, the fork in the road seemed inevitable for mates of such different approaches to life. The ending should have come sooner but like most endings got postponed in deference to improved conditions right around the corner.

  The Norton went next, till it was down to two cans, cat food and cream ‘o chicken, perfect for a writer and two cats.

  A young man can get back up and jump back in, maybe not so convincingly as those guys who spring from their shoulders onto their feet, but new action waited just down the road as a matter of faith. And necessity.

  Billy Prieshard was new in town and already dating former contributing writer and deb du jour Delia DeNerien hardly a month after she’d split up with her old boyfriend, an original redneck Republican. Billy was old hat, a traditional southern son but a might different on account of his fancy pants ways that he shore as shit didn’t learn up in Myrtle Beach, where the Prieshards had lived and died these last few centuries. I’m here to tell you they’s something not right with that boy . . .

  Billy Prieshard wasn’t to be trusted on account of being from up the road, which wasn’t as bad as a Yankee but it Was. Not. Home. Nobody would leave home and come in somewheres else to fleece a few flatlanders but a carpetbagger or worse, a scalawag. Besides his apparent crimes against society, that godforsaken boy could not be trusted on political principle, in the emerging Republican tradition of distrust. Suspected of liberal ideas learned in the North, Billy Prieshard had gone and bought up some apartment buildings and sold the units as condominiums—what Dee’s former boyfriend called condominials, to cast them in laughable light where they belonged. Why, who else but a scalawag sumbitch would take some apartments and sell them individually to separate buyers? Can you believe that shit? Condominiums were a radical new concept in South Carolina, with no grass nor bushes nor yard boys, none you’d need to care for anyway. But you would need to pay every month—make at ever damn month—for someone to take care of things. That was the catch. Topping off all that shit was the worst notion of all: this Billy fella made a heap o’ dough in no time, and now Mister Moneybags was banging our Delia!

  I couldn’t make the next payment on the little house the estranged wife and I bought for twenty-five thousand by taking over payments with 5% down. But the bank didn’t yet know of my situation, and with equity, an enterprising fellow had a month to borrow eight grand against the p
lace on a dummy loan app, maybe ten grand, since those were the days of “banking relationships.” If you knew a banker and a couple three jokes bearing down on pussy and/or football, you had a relationship. A relationship allowed the banking officer to approve the loan. The loan app was required like resumes were required, to demonstrate adaptive ability in a demanding society. Nobody checked.

  I told Billy Prieshard I wanted to convert some condos like he did but on a smaller scale, because I only had eight grand to draw on. Maybe ten. Maybe I could line up fifteen in a pinch.

  He said that could be the right amount to get going on a duplex or maybe even a fourplex, but he’d searched the entire town and could flat guarantee: there weren’t none.

  Fuck.

  He said, “Look. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m full o’ shit most of the time. Okay? You go look for yourself. You find anything outa your range, you call me. We’ll work something out.”

  That felt better. “What’s your range?”

  “I don’t know.” With the casual power shrug of an original bubba who’d been to town, he looked up as if to find his limit. “Maybe a million dollars.”

  He could have said a hundred zillion, which was about how much a million was back then. The region was crawling with rednecks like Dee’s old boyfriend, with their outrageous conservative color and cocaine to balance the liquor—oh, and family values and a rebel yell as necessary. Why, sheeyit.