A large blonde woman, somewhat older and considerably heavier than the one in the photographs, appears on the balcony with a cigarette in her hand.
‘Hold on,’ she says, ‘I’m on AOL talkin’ with a guy in Atlanta. He has a boat.’
I wait outside, listening to the splatter of rain falling down the tree. Now I hear her boots again as she comes thumping downstairs and opens the door. She has slightly downturned eyes and a strong pointed nose. A faint air of suspicion lurks beneath her forthright manner. She has broad shoulders and narrow hips in tight pressed jeans over riding boots, all of which accentuate her confident strut. She’s very much a woman, and yet she is a tomboy too, a sportswoman. A loose T-shirt veils her midsection. Two dachshunds scurry around her, barking.
Having greeted me warmly (‘How y’all doing?’), she leads me down a windowless corridor toward the back of the house. The day is a black-and-white photograph that wasn’t left in the developer long enough, and in here it’s even worse. What little light the day has to spare cannot penetrate the lace curtain on the front door nor creep in from the two large front rooms on either side. Seventy-five-watt bulbs excrete a dim yellow glow which is instantly consumed by the heavy wallpaper and the many dark antiques.
My room is on the left at the back. A huge wooden bed juts out diagonally from the far corner. More lace curtains prevent light from entering, but as far as I can see the place is tastefully done with more antiques and some historical pictures of Dayton. On a table just inside the door are some home-made cookies and a jug of water.
Even on this trip, the peasant brings his hoe, a laptop, so he can keep on toiling for the Squire. I’ve been writing a screenplay for MGM/UA. Set in Manhattan during the Christmas season, it’s about a highly educated woman who uses chemical and biological warfare agents to intimidate the city into giving her millions of dollars.
I took the project because I needed the money and liked the studio people and the producer. I’ve done one draft, which is as scary as any thriller I’ve ever seen (too much so, as it will eventually turn out), but no one really likes it. It’s too complicated here and not complicated enough there. I’m interested in the psychology of it, they’re disappointed by the lack of action. It’s doomed to fail and if I had any balls I’d walk away. The trouble is I need the money a rewrite would bring and, even more embarrassing, I’ve fallen in love with my characters. Like a sentimental nun at an orphanage, I can’t bear to let them go into foster care. What if some hack comes along and stuffs a cigar and clichés in my hero’s mouth, gives him a big pistol, and writes BLAM!!! KERCHUNK!!! every time he fires it? And what if my wonderfully intelligent, shamelessly erotic woman becomes coy and simpering? No, it’s unthinkable.
So … I ask Gloria for a desk and set myself up for a couple of hours of work, a long, grovelling letter to the Lords of the Manor: I failed with the tomatoes, please, please let me try tobacco.
My pathetic letter soon sickens me and I go in search of Gloria. She’s upstairs in her den. The place is stuffed with antiques and dachshunds and ashtrays. The curtains are partially drawn and most of the light comes from a bulb mounted above a ceiling fan. This means the light flickers incessantly. The fan does not appear to cleanse the room of nicotine. She’s taking pennies from a brass bowl stocked over many years and inserting them in cardboard tubes to take down to the bank. Her computer is in a corner, connected to AOL, and she glances at it hopefully, as a fisherman checks his float; but for the moment the e-males lurk elsewhere.
I ask her why she’s selling the Magnolia House. She tells me she bought it after many years of saving and then married a man who should have been an ideal partner—he was a chef—but the marriage failed and he left her in debt.
‘Now I gotta go back into retail. I’ve got a job up in Pennsylvania. Amish country. Imagine what the men are gonna be like up there.’
Her hoarse smoker’s laugh hacks out. She ain’t gonna whine, hell no, she’s a survivor, tough as nails, donchoo worry. That being so, she jumps up and says she has a few errands to run and would I like to come with her and she’ll show me some of the town along the way? I grab my notebook and join her outside. She has a Ford Explorer which she climbs into with a cigarette in one hand and a beaker of fluid in the other.
‘Yep, when I leave here I’m off to Hershey, Pennsylvania,’ she tells me as we set off. ‘It’s where they make the chocolate. They say they got street lamps in the shape of chocolate kisses.’ In the melancholy process of closing down one dream, she’s already reaching for another. Chocolate kisses, roses, and champagne: the heart is a lonely hunter but there’s a Hallmark card at the end of every highway.
As we turn onto the main street a car goes by. Gloria raises four fingers of one hand while keeping its heel on the wheel.
‘That’s the steering wheel wave,’ she says. ‘If you like someone, it’s like that. If it’s just an acquaintance, it’s this’: A single finger rises in polite acknowledgment. ‘And on the subject of greetings, when you actually come face to face with someone? “Hey,” never “Hi” or “Hello.” Like this: “Hey, how ya doin’?”’
How am I doing? I’m doing fine. But I’m looking at the town and it’s not how I imagined it. Dayton’s population is now just over 6,000, about what it was a hundred years ago at the height of the boom. I had imagined a quaint Southern town done up for the tourists, but the place seems small and run-down and not very historic at all. I mention this to Gloria, who tells me a lot of old houses have been knocked down recently to make room for parking lots. A sign goes up saying, ‘Another Parking Lot Brought to You by the Town of Dayton.’ These parking lots are for the tourists, who will of course stop coming if there aren’t any old buildings left to see, and it’s not until much later I realise this perfectly symbolises how Dayton feels about itself. It’s proud such a historic event as the Scopes Trial took place here and happy to take the tourists’ money; but it’s also embarrassed because what H. L. Mencken ridiculed it for being in 1925 (a hick town full of ‘yokels’ and ‘Neanderthal’ fundamentalists) remains unchanged. In fact, even before the trial began, Dayton had qualms about how it might be viewed.
‘Today, with the curtain barely rung up and the worst buffooneries to come,’ wrote Mencken in a dispatch to the Baltimore Evening Sun in 1925, ‘it is obvious to even the town boomers that getting upon the map, like patriotism, is not enough … Two months ago the town was obscure and happy. Today it is a universal joke.’
Modern Daytonians prefer to talk about the economic promise of the highway or about the biggest La-Z-Boy plant in the United States, which lies just outside of town and provides employment for around 2,000 men and women. As good Baptists, they must stick with Bryan; as men and women on the verge of the twenty-first century, they blush.
We drive along Main Street, a pretty but unkempt street with several vacant storefronts, past the place where Robinson’s drugstore used to be—it’s a furniture store now—and come to the courthouse where the trial took place. Set back in the middle of a grass square, it’s a tall, red brick building surrounded by old shade trees. It’s beautiful in a way and unchanged since before the Twenties. We park off to one side and enter.
Gloria struts in, toes turned out, good ol’ boy tummy thrust forward, and engages all she meets with gregarious elan. ‘Hey, how ya doin’?’ ‘Yep, that’s right. I’m closin’ out, I’m on my way.’ Everyone seems to like her … but they also seem a little nervous of her too. Her mother’s family is from here and she still has relatives, but she grew up in Los Angeles, only coming here for a year of school and during summer vacations. She must have been a real beauty in those days and if she doesn’t have the circumspection of the small-town dweller now, in middle age, you can be sure she didn’t then.
I wander outside and then down into the basement where the Scopes Museum is. It’s open Monday to Friday from eight to four, but not on weekends, when people might actually come to see it.
There are old photographs of
Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, and all the other characters. Darrow looks rumpled and exhausted but amiably pugnacious, Bryan prim and foolish with his palm fan and his pith helmet, confirming my impression of an aging actor still desperate for an audience. From the photographs, you see no sign of ill-health in Bryan, who would die a few days after the pictures were taken and the trial ended. Rappleyea is wiry and alert, with his huge brush of greying hair. John Scopes is young and handsome and shy. There are shots of Mencken and crowds of other press and radio reporters, and of ‘Mendi the Monkey,’ actually a trained chimpanzee, cranking the handle of a movie camera. It’s a carnival, a vaudeville show on the subject of God. It must have been the most fun Dayton ever had.
I don’t have time to read everything so I walk upstairs to the courtroom, which is on the second floor. No one’s there. It’s a spacious court with large windows on three sides and it’s quiet and impressive in its simplicity and I can imagine how it must have been during the trial, Darrow standing there, Bryan there, the jury—who in fact were almost never in court—over there, and the judge issuing his rulings from the bench.
I go downstairs and find Gloria, who has registered whatever bureaucratic admission of failure is required and is ready to go. We drive over to City Hall, or some modern section of it over by the equally modern library, and while she clatters off in her boots, I read old framed news clippings on the wall. One of them tells of a local resident, W. C. Gardenhire, who returned from Fiji in 1871 bringing four Fijians whom he ‘exhibited in Wood-ward Gardens in San Francisco, sometimes for $150, before selling them to P. T. Barnum for $20,000.’ Gloria returns and we get back in the car and drive to the One Hour Photo out on the highway. I sit in the car. A weather-beaten woman parks her pickup next to me, gets out, spits on the ground, and then enters the shop. Gloria comes out. The photographs she wanted aren’t ready. ‘As we say in the South,’ she explains, ‘“We’re fixing to start thinking about getting ready to do it.”’
We start driving around town.
There are two big events in Dayton these days. One is the Strawberry Festival. Strawberry farming has always been a large part of the local economy and this is its celebration. There are strawberry pie contests and all that kind of thing and a carnival comes to town. This latter draws all the rednecks out of the surrounding hills. Gloria says you can’t imagine how they’ve been up there all year long and you haven’t seen them, a scary crew, inbred retards, illiterates, and nuts. I’m devastated to have missed this, but I was busy poisoning New York when it happened and couldn’t get away.
Still, I’ve got the other big event, which will take place in about a month. In fact I’m only down here as a prelude to that, to pick up local colour.
The other event is the ‘Re-enactment of the Scopes Trial.’ In most people’s opinion the trial was a blow to the cause of fundamentalism. That the town would re-enact this humiliation each year—presumably to pull down some cash—strikes me as hilarious and I can’t wait to see it. Gloria tells me that the real sheriff, Leon Sneed, actually plays the sheriff in the show. It is at this point that I decide for certain to make the play the centrepiece of my book.
As we continue driving around, I now see that Dayton is defined by two straight lines, the highway on one side and the railroad track on the other. The railroad goes from Atlanta to Chicago and carries only freight. Beyond the highway are some nice suburban houses scattered on the hillside. Beyond the tracks are the projects where most of Dayton’s black people live. No black families live in the hills. One tried a few years back and the rednecks burned the house down.
We cross the track, which has barriers but no gates. According to Gloria—and it’s confirmed later—more people have been killed on this section of track than on any other section in the entire United States.
No one seems to know exactly how many have been killed in the last decade, but it’s approaching twenty. The railroad that brought Dayton to life and made it the number one city in Rhea County is now knocking off its citizens at an alarming rate. Six people were killed between March ’96 and August ’97. The train drivers call Dayton ‘The Big Blow’ because when they get to the edge of town they put their hand on the horn and keep it there until they make it out the other side. Why so many people have allowed themselves to be killed in this gruesome fashion is a mystery to everyone. And soon there’s going to be another mystery.
The projects are not like city projects. Cheap but not egregiously ugly two-storey houses are dotted around a loop. There’s not the same atmosphere of overcrowding and fear that you find up in Harlem or in Watts. Kids play amiably on the streets and sidewalks and residents stroll around gunless. I notice there are many kids of mixed race and remark on this to Gloria.
‘Oh, yeah,’ says Gloria, casually, ‘there’s a lot of that ’round here. A lot of the white girls think it’s sexy.’
I ask her how she feels about this.
‘I don’t care who has sex with who,’ she replies, driving with her knee and drawing on her cigarette between sips of the unspecified fluid, ‘so long as they love each other, but I was always attracted to Caucasians.’
‘And lots of them, I would imagine,’ I say, flatteringly.
It doesn’t get the laugh I expected. Instead she glances at me flatly and then looks forward again before saying with just a hint of weariness:
‘Yep, I always liked men. Even when I was a kid my mommy says I’d go up to a guy and cling to his leg and call him “Daddy.” I guess that tells you something about how much my daddy was around.’
When we get back to the Magnolia House, Gloria proudly shows me around her garden. ‘These are my Elephant Ear, these are my hollyhocks, these are my gladioli.’ She stares down sadly. ‘I ain’t even gonna be around when my gladioli bloom.’
We walk around the side of the house.
‘These are Cantors, gettin’ ready to bloom. This is a Dinner Plate … shit I forget the name of it, anyway, it was real hard to come by, I had to order it, and this is its second year and it’ll bloom this year for the first time. It blooms these flowers that are just awesome.’ She stares down at the plant and then moves on. ‘These are getting ready to bloom. And these are getting ready to bloom,’ she says, her voice sadder each time.
We move to the front of the house where the magnolia tree stands. It’s an old, extensive tree which grows high above the house and all around the front and is much of the reason why the house is so dark inside. There’s something exquisitely Southern about the magnolia. It’s a beautiful, overloaded tree with large, exotic white flowers that smell sweet and languorous, but at the same time it’s nothing but trouble.
‘Damn thing never stops,’ says Gloria, ‘sheds all the time, all year round: leaves, acorns, fuzzballs, the blossoms, then the leaves again, then the fuzzballs … Drives you nuts.’ She grabs hold of a branch with a flower on it and poses as I take a photograph.
That evening, Gloria has to have dinner with some neighbours. Rhea County, in which Dayton lies, is as dry today as it was in 1925, but it’s unclear quite what this means and it certainly doesn’t seem to stop anyone drinking. You can cross the county line, get drunk, and drive back. You can open a hunting or fishing club and serve liquor there, and for some reason no one seems to understand, the restaurant where I’ll eat tonight, Ayola’s Mexican Restaurant, is allowed to serve beer. However, in the house where Gloria is going, they don’t drink, so she reaches into the refrigerator (we’re hanging out in the kitchen, smoking) and takes out a square cardboard flagon of white wine which she purchased in Chattanooga. She hefts the thing up under her arm and expertly squirts herself a substantial drink. Then she asks me, would I like a glass?
Since I was fourteen, I have always drunk too much. Drinking too much is the way you drink in England. It’s the point. I have friends there who consume eight pints of beer every single night. Eight pints. An aborigine can live for a month on eight pints of liquid, and wash himself off with what’s left at the
end of it. In my twenties, I was arrested, thrown in jail, and banned from driving for a year for drunk-driving. (I was also, to my surprise and the amusement of the court, charged with ‘attempting to bribe a Metropolitan Policeman with a sausage.’ I’d stopped outside an all-night sausage vending outfit in Notting Hill in a futile attempt to sober up and when the cop arrived, I offered to buy him one too.) Because of alcohol I drove away my first wife and lost several friends. I’ve made career-killing, weirdly coherent but utterly sinister remarks to studio executives who remember what I said fifteen years later and back away as I approach on toes curling with shame. I’ve seduced women of all ages, both beautiful and ugly (and one who was beautiful but weighed 300 pounds), and even woke up one morning with a perky young woman I’d never seen before, who asked if I really did want to marry her because she had always wanted to marry an English film director, which I then was. Worse still, I’ve damaged my memory, lost hours to blackouts, and wasted years of life on hangovers and alcohol-related despair.
Of course, I’d love a glass.
I walk a line. I’ve been to Alcoholics Anonymous once or twice, once with my mother, whom I tricked into coming to an unfortunately glamorous meeting at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, where she promptly fell into a rebellious sleep, dressed in her Marks and Spencer slacks, snoring, while I, mortified, watched one gorgeous, vulnerable, sexually exploitable, corn-fed, would-be model/actress take the stand and ’fess up to crimes of abandon, each one more arousing than the next. And the point is, in spite of the voyeuristic fascination of it all, AA is not for me. Not if it’s me who eventually has to go up there and tell the awful truth, and certainly not if I have to prostrate my ego before ‘A Higher Power.’
Trials of the Monkey Page 7