1969 and Then Some

by Robert Wintner

  Billy Prieshard had that same twang, but he’d graduated Yale law school and was deemed dangerous because his law degree didn’t show. Dee told me about his ticket to steal with a wink to keep it on the Q.T., because Billy didn’t want people thinking he was uppity or tricky or taking advantage as a practicing member of the South Carolina Bar Association. Well, sir, it was a whole heap o’ exotic shit they was packing into the heads of college boys back then, maybe some of it not so evil, but a Yale Law degree just felt wrong, what with him poking his nose into medium and low-priced real estate that way. Why, a man with a Yale law degree ought to aim a might higher. Shouldn’t he? They thought Billy was tricky, what with his low approach and uppity manners, but no matter what anyone thought, Billy P was not your run of the mill redneck.

  I found the Sans Souci Apartments that afternoon, for sale in the classifieds. The agent wanted to know who, what and wherefrom in a process known as qualifying—but the process felt like a stickler, so removed from the brotherhood so recently lived in another place that didn’t seem so far away but was. Most importantly, the agent honed in on what he’d clearly established: that the wherefrom was not from around here.

  Not so long ago that brand of exclusionary superiority would have been grounds for a demonstration. Times had changed, but with the will of a proven independent I responded to authority like a knee-jerk. The agent plainly heard an outlander on the line. He chuckled into the phone to indicate that some things could not be changed by any force of nature, and place of birth was one o’ them thangs, meaning that the property would not be shown without clear demonstration of the means to buy the property.

  Well, if a seller felt uncomfortable with money derived from, let’s say, yonder, then a potential buyer could pursue other property or maybe contact the owner . . . “Whoa, whoa, whoa bubba. Get offa yo high horse and get on down a my office and we talk.”

  The talking phase was meant to qualify the . . . er . . . uh . . . ability of . . . uh . . . you to . . . uh . . . put a deal of this magnitude together. The kid’s name was Chester A. Arthur—I shitchu not—but it should have been Chester A. Riley by the time we got done. What a revoltin’ development this is.

  The Life of Riley was a gem of the 50s, what the 60s loved most for the amazing goofs.

  That is, young Chester didn’t have much to be proud of but his birthplace and the idiom he’d learned there. Chester knew the advantages of superiority and how to be superior in the scheme of things. Unfortunately for Chester, he had yet to romp with Br’er Rabbit in the briar patch. He may still be out there, by this time more seasoned in humility and judgment. Maybe not. Chester was old family, a youth ensconced in a time warp, meaning a King Street office way too big for anything but show. Chester wasn’t only from around here, the Arthurs were 17th Century, ready for the wax museum. Huguenots and Tories peppered the place with family graves out back of the house from 16 ought 9 or 1714—or the Johnnie-come-latelies of only a century ago.

  Young Chester A. Arthur sat in an old executive leather chair under an oversized coat of arms in the blue oxford cloth/button-down shirt/khaki pants/Weejuns uniform to demonstrate uniformity—or abject sameness. And a rep tie, because he was on the job. “How you do-een?” Beyond the rote greeting of the flatlands, young Chester awaited reverence, or at least deference. A dim bulb who couldn’t read much by his own light, he asked condescending questions and provided nothing. Sitting back with a sigh he let the leather finish squeaking before he regretted have to decline to show the property on account of failure to demonstrate the wherewithal to . . . uh, you know . . . uh . . . bring a goddamn thing to closing. Outa escrow. You know what escrow is?

  I went on down to the Men’s Club I still belonged to, because it was only twenty-five bucks a month, because it was still in its original condition since around 1900. People liked their facilities in original condition in the sultry South. Original condition kept the dues low and gave practical value to the adage, too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash. The Club attracted its fair share of powerful men in town who wanted to relax without somebody hitting them up for favors or inside information. The Club was an afternoon stop where members played racquet sports or steamed, jawed and unwound—where the unspoken code relieved everybody of solicitation and need.

  Truth be told, the old guys wallowed in the privacy and loved the recognition, when a young guy needed some inside skinny.

  The Club didn’t mind if I was a few months late on dues, because a young fellow’s luck might change. Charleston was like that, showing the flipsides of ignorance and hospitality in short order. Every time I had cause to think it a mean place, I got corrected; it wasn’t mean. It was only stupid in some people and only on occasion at that. Above all, it loved a sociable gathering, which wasn’t a’tall like the love all around us but had the same warmth and glow. New Year’s Eve, 1969 was a fur piece from the Club’s annual dinner in a tent, where members anteed up three dollars for a pound of fresh boiled shrimp to peel and eat with cocktail sauce and a few beers and a rib-eye with ketchup and more shrimp if you still hungry and want another steak, fuck yeah, we got plenty. It wasn’t the same but came from the same stuff, Southern hospitality and the love all around us.

  I ran into Sonny Goldberg coming out of the steam room, just the guy I’d been looking for, because Sonny knew everything and everybody and everything everybody was up to. At sixty-two Sonny was a short, pudgy old man—no exercise, too much stress and fried chicken. Sonny used the Club for steam and solace from the ration of grief his father had dished out for years. Sonny’s management of the family furniture company was plain damn careless. What good could come of a boy who plain damn won’t listen? Sonny was still the boy. He’d gone through life with what Old Mom called all the breaks, and there he was, rich and suffering.

  Sonny’s father was eighty something, and Sonny never stopped asking what it was his father wanted. “I can’t figure it out. We sell furniture. I do it wrong, because I don’t do it his way. I bring in more money than he ever did.” Sonny hated his father’s daily rant, but he loved his father’s survival, balancing stress and fried chicken with genetics. Sonny was proud of his management and sales skills too. Why, he had entire bedroom sets he’d sold three times—some of them priced right now to sell a fourth time for more money than the third time. He liked anybody who wasn’t young and dumb and married with kids, unlike most of his clients. He shared his best opener on a regular basis and was proud of that too, because it could still close a deal to a newlywed couple surely as it did thirty years ago—or ten years ago, or last year: “You know, the bank says your credit isn’t worth shit! And I say it is.”

  “Hey, Sonny. Who owns the Sans Souci Apartments?”

  “I do. Why?”

  “Why would you list it with such an ignorant schmendrik?”

  Note the code word here, schmendrik, underscoring the secret conspiracy among Jews around the world, who let each other know in a single word that it’s us on the inside and them what’s out. Okay, it’s the same behavior exploited by “local” guys in provincial burgs around the world. At least with us it’s worldwide, and anybody can learn the jargon.

  “I didn’t list it. He wants me to list it. Why would I list it? He’s advertising it. That’s all. I told him he could advertise it if he wants to and bring me a buyer. He can earn a commission if he sells it. Why would I give him a commission otherwise?” Sonny didn’t wonder why, but then he wondered, “Why? You want to buy it?”

  Billy Prieshard remains unique for his Yale law degree and molasses drawl flowing sweetly over the teeth hanging innocently to his knees. Yes, Billy had the instinct for the quick and merciful kill, what some people called jugular, yet the odd counterpart to that formidable power was a heart that stands out with trust and goodwill. He listened to the summary disposition on the Sans Souci Apartments, turned to me and said, “Okay. We’ll go thirds. Is that okay with you?”

  A million questions flooded in, one for each dollar. M
ake no mistake, Billy Prieshard was no mystery tramp, but I stared into the vacuum of his eyes and said, “That sounds good.”

  A young man with no discernible means of support was asked to participate in a million dollar deal—and something echoed off the canyon walls. Maybe it was confidence or faith, either one learned best from the toughest teacher, Professor Hard Knocks. And yes, Bob Dylan encouraged a slow nod on a painfully repetitive lyric, because I had nothing and nothing to lose and felt invisible with a few secrets to conceal but still unmoored and loosely rolling as a rolling stone. How did it feel?

  No doubt about it, feelings ran one decade to the next, but the times they were a changin’. In a phone call Billy Prieshard brought in a bank on a relationship of magnitude via the president, a former associate. So we set up escrow to close in a hundred fifty days concurrent with individual escrows on each unit to close the same day to individual buyers who didn’t even yet know those units were for sale but would buy nevertheless—80% of them anyway—because they already lived there! All this in two minutes flat, three on the outside, roughshod to be sure but we had a hundred fifty fucking days to iron out the details and that’s five months in any dialect. The bank also provided mortgage loans to those buyers at 8½%—this was 1979, when interest rates soared, eventually to 20% and higher—fairly imbuing us with characteristics similar to Robin fucking Hood, taking from the rich and giving to the poor.

  How did we manage to pull off 8½%?

  Easy. It was South Carolina!

  We made a bank president our other one-third partner!

  We wouldn’t need any financing to buy the property, because we’d never own it, because concurrent escrow closing on the property and the individual units would happen in the same moment, squeezing scads of profit from the thin air!

  Was it a cop out? Or had we broken on through to the other side? I suspected all new insight to the benefits of a regional concept called asshole bubbas? In favorable light the process rendered a young man ready for a lifetime of magnanimous giving.

  Billy did the legal part. The banker’s role was silent, what with the better part of valor and all that. And I handled sales—thirty units in sixty days. Oh, they were a good deal, and I was, in a cultural, revolutionary context once again, a natural. I had no money and couldn’t believe these guys would just take me on, so I repeated my pledge to Billy to get a second mortgage on my house or better yet dummy up a loan application and—

  “Stop.”

  Billy waved that one off, mumbling about cost benefit and enough risk where it was warranted without sticking our asses over the parapet for chump change. Then he covered my end. Few people in anyone’s life are as generous and true as Billy. I used to wonder why he did that and years later realized that some people actually go through life without needing to screw anybody.

  The canned cream o’chicken and cat food remaining in March went to eighty grand by December, and that was some dough in those days, mobilization dough, let’s-get-this-life-started dough—dinner out with drinks and dessert.

  Then came the tough question: would a free spirit with values intact and apparent narrative talent want to be a southern writer? Or would he best consider the rest of the world? A few southern writers shone with wit and insight though the truly greats seemed mostly dead, and those remaining sounded tediously similar to each other, leaning hard on idiom as a substitute for substance—like the accent in Charleston; it got thicker if the speaker wanted to emphasize inclusion or exclusion to those addressed. How else could the south be portrayed in narrative fiction without such caricature? Well, it could be portrayed as anywhere else could be portrayed, without the accent, the idiom and tedious repetition. What was wrong with that?

  You’d still have the natural beauty, the country people and the wildlife teeming like few places in the world. Then again, most characters suffered from public education, and though a few rare intellects surfaced in the southland, nearly all yarns were burdened with idiom and accent. A narrative could consciously avoid bubba and cornpone, but why be in a place if only to avoid its character? Better to avoid the place if it still felt repetitious, tedious and predictable. Alternatives seemed less limited by pervasive sameness. Other places seemed more variable, formative and dynamic. It was a tough choice, with the southern place quickly becoming my place, opening its arms to a single man with some money, a man quickly becoming included.

  Billy Prieshard and the banker offered another one-third interest in a new project with more reasonable potential. That would be an apartment complex not too far from the State Capitol in Columbia, South Carolina, twelve hundred units of abandoned HUD project housing—yes, right down in the heart of the projects. “What’re you afraid of?” the banker asked. “You’ll fit right in. Those people will take to you—don’t get me wrong now. You’re the best! You proved it. You think we’d do this project without you? Fuck no! You think we’d find another fella with your natural talents to send in there?”

  That was the money talking. And I didn’t take him wrong. I knew what he meant even if he didn’t—that a white man in the 70s who judged people on compassion and manners had likely learned those things from the 60s. It was obvious, but a stranger in a strange land does not stop the action to explain what’s blowing in the wind.

  I felt that the banker would have no qualms about sending in any white boy in flip flops or a black salesman in a tuxedo if that person could squeeze the dollars from the project. I was the hustler they knew—I could shuffle the paper correctly and had passed the crash course in what not to say and to whom not to say it. I also believed that most of the project residents would indeed take to me and didn’t dwell on the idea that it wouldn’t take more than one of the project residents to stab or shoot me and kill the deal. I spent a night or two crunching the payout and figured it could well be the last non-artistic work a man would ever have to do.

  Served on a platter front and center sat the golden opportunity only a fool would ignore. Here was damn near retirement in short order with no risk but the time required. My investment would be what the capitalist system calls sweat equity—except that the system vests no equity in sweat. You plain won’t find a sweat-equity buy-in, but there it was. Bankers scoff at the notion, dismissing sweat equity as an oxymoron. Bankers are the first to insist that money talks. Bullshit walks. Yet my two main lawyer and banker bubbas offered a one-third interest in a multi-million dollar sellout with no money down. Damn. If that wasn’t radical then I didn’t know what for—an aspiring artist slipped time and again on easy slang. It put the goods at risk and was damn near impossible to avoid.

  Never mind.

  Quick and easy felt like a combo for success—along with honest value and minimal exposure. Yes, financing was marginally legal, possibly illegal, but the end result would be good for the buyers and us. We would go in with fire-rated sheetrock between each unit to get the places in legal conformance to the condominium building code, then paint up, fix up and get the hell out at 15% below market with below market financing available to buyers who could qualify for the loan or not qualify.

  I loved those guys. They brought me in on a few million dollars of real estate with a few pages of options as the major up-front outlay that would get us into the deal. Actual cash down was less than the three of us would spend on a month of gas and groceries. Billy and the banker had no clue on market response but were willing to take the risk on our sales boy, who was me. My two main bubbas weren’t so cynical on the right guy for the job relative to the sales issue. They loved me right back because we’d made solid dough together and could do it again on a more genteel scale, because I was perfect—because I didn’t even wear shoes in the summertime! They couldn’t get over it: thirty sales in sixty days in flip flops! They viewed my casual approach to bidness as the magic ingredient to several million more dollars.

  Billy figured we’d clear ten to fifteen grand a unit, depending on momentum. Too much time meant too much exposure, so we might have to
fire sale the last few. Who knew? But I should clear two or three grand a unit—wait a minute? Twelve hundred times two thousand? That’s two million, four hundred thousand dollars!

  “You gonna live there, bubba! Two years. Maybe three.”

  And I would have done it as a sentence without parole that wouldn’t be so bad on account of the colorful adventures surely waiting. Talk about grist for the mill!

  I declined.

  Two to three years of prime fillet in a writer’s career could not be sacrificed for money. And no, I did not want to be a southern writer, not even in the bona fide projects striving for gentrification.

  They say nobody knows what might have been on the road not taken. I don’t believe it, and I slap my knee on a peek down the south fork. Sheeyit.

  Moreover, I had faced the cop out and moved on.

  Westward Ho

  JONI MITCHELL SANG of sitting in a park in Paris, France lamenting lost dreams but feeling so homesick for California she would even kiss a Sunset pig.

  Heading down the road with the right tunes on the box has been a primary benefit to the spirit since cars began. It made sense of a migration in late youth—another migration, with the clock ticking. Paris seemed as far from South Carolina as crudités from corn pone. So did California, yet her siren song lured the whole show westward to new horizons, and California-bound with a couple of cats felt like old home week one more time, like getting back to where we once belonged. No generation generated music with such staying power; at ten years old the power tunes pumped like brand new, sometimes better.

  Wait a minute—Jojo left his home in bumfuck Carolina, for some California grass. Well, hell, a westbound migration can take a quick look back with easy caricature and good riddance. Yet a tear rolled for those tidal marshlands and oyster roasts and down-home feeds with all the boys at the Club and the social warmth and so many fine women stopping by to say farewell. What the fuck you do-een, boy? You crazy?