by Julia Reed
While this story was being told (to some very nice people, including one guy who happens to be a billionaire), I was standing there, not just a little embarrassed, it having dawned on me that I was not looking all that hot in this narrative. Forward, demanding, trashy even, are just a few of the adjectives that come to mind, but my generous new pal offered up the anecdote as proof of my ingenuity and clairvoyant powers instead. Clearly, he doesn’t know much about drummers.
Drummers are badasses. I knew if there were anyone who’d still have a pack or two handy, it would be him (chefs remain reliable sources too, of course, but they were way back in the cooking tent). My great friend Bill Dunlap was a drummer in a rock-and-roll group called the Imperial Show Band before he straightened up and became a painter (and now a writer too) instead. The pantheon of jazz and rock-and-roll greats is crowded: Ginger Baker, Roy Haynes, Philly Joe Jones, Charlie Watts, Buddy Rich, Keith Moon, and Questlove, just to name a handful. If you are too young to know who most of these people are, download their music at once. Without Watts, there would be no Rolling Stones. Ditto Baker and Cream. That sound you hear at the end of the Who’s “Love, Reign o’er Me”? “Moon the Loon” flipping over his drum set. Also, I am not in the least bit ashamed to say that Ringo was always my favorite Beatle, though admittedly my attachment was not immediate. I was three and a half and in Nashville when the band made their Ed Sullivan Show debut. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why my entire extended family had gathered breathlessly around my Uncle Evans’s snowy TV set to watch what I had assumed would be insects crawling across the screen. Once I got it, Ringo was my man.
One of the more extraordinary facts about my extraordinary mother is that when she was a very chaste sophomore at Vanderbilt, she had a sort of thing with a drummer named, I swear, Otto Bash. A date (a presentable one, a fellow her own age) had taken her to hear Otto at the Celtic Room in Nashville’s notorious nightclub district Printer’s Alley (liquor by the drink, illegal until 1967 in Nashville, was readily available). Fairly quickly, Mama lost interest in the date and took up with Otto, who was almost twice her age. She recalls going to a party at Otto’s apartment where “at least twenty half-nude women” mingled and danced. Inexplicably, she brought Otto home to her parents’ house in Belle Meade, where she still lived, and that was the end of that. When my grandfather, a former naval officer and still very fit star baseball player, discovered them playing cards in the library, he picked Otto up by the scruff of his neck (“sort of like a cat,” my mother says) and escorted him out of the house. “He was a different experience for me, I can tell you.” I’ll say. But I get it. First of all, there’s that name. Second of all, the lure of the minstrel is age-old and powerful.
For example, in the late eighteenth century a Frenchman named Christophe Colomb, who claimed to be a descendant of Christopher Columbus (and who was said to be on the run as a result of a plot involving the French Revolution), turned up on Louisiana’s River Road, home to the indigo and sugarcane planters who were then the country’s wealthiest men. One of those planters, Marius Bringier, grew fond of the charming Colomb, an itinerant painter, raconteur, and musician. Not wanting to be deprived of his company, Bringier arranged for his daughter Fanny to marry him, and in 1801 built the couple a stunning Greek Revival box called Bocage that still stands on the banks of the Mississippi. Fanny, all of fourteen at the time, wrote in her diary that she was a tad freaked out about the compelled union, but in no time she too succumbed to the charms of her husband. Fanny ran the plantation while Colomb hung out on his ornamental barge, reclining beneath a hand-painted silk canopy, playing tunes on his guitar. Along the way, the couple managed to have eight children, and by all accounts their marriage was a blissful one.
I was about Fanny’s age when I fell for a similarly captivating minstrel, Leonard Cohen. I wore out the grooves of Cohen’s Songs from a Room on the stereo I took with me to boarding school, and Scotch-taped his dreamy photo (the album sleeve) to the ceiling above my dorm-room bed. The first LP I bought with my own money was Bob Dylan’s Planet Waves, and let me stop and say right here that his Nobel was long overdue. If you don’t believe that lyrics are literature, listen to “Visions of Johanna” or pretty much the entirety of Blood on the Tracks, which is not unlike reading Chekhov. If you don’t believe he’s soulful and sexy as all get-out, even now, listen to Joan Baez singing “Yellow Coat.” Or to Dylan’s own “Something There Is About You” or “Sara” or “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You.” I could go on. Anyway, the best songwriters have always been poets. Cohen’s endlessly romantic “Alexandra Leaving” was based on C. P. Cavafy’s “The God Abandons Antony”—except that, naturally, Alexandria the city becomes Alexandra the woman.
When I was in college, I turned my attention to a musician from my hometown whom I actually knew. As with Otto Bash and my mother, he was at least twice my age, and even though he lived in L.A. and I lived in D.C., we got together whenever we were in the Delta, which was a fair amount. He was heavenly to look at, had a real-live band called Fun with Animals, and when he played the piano he was so emotionally and physically all in, it was impossible to take your eyes off him. During one spring break visit home, I had a dinner party at my parents’ house that ended up with everyone taking a dip in the unlit pool, and when we got out, I noticed that the object of my affection was missing—along with my best friend. Almost a whole day later they were found, communing in a cotton field, by the local sheriff, who had been roused by my friend’s increasingly frantic mother and rather more disgusted father. I was a tad miffed myself, but I forgave her pretty quick. I knew, after all. At the time, he’d been testing out a ballad that began, “With Jack Daniel’s for company, you go wherever you please.” The chorus contained the line “But I’ll wrap my love around you, all night long,” and you sort of had to hear it, but, trust me, it was heartbreaking in all the right ways. Plus, the best friend in question (and yes, she still retains the title) happens to be a musician too. In fairly short order, they ended up getting married and stayed that way long enough to have a son, a talented chef and a fine, funny young man who is one of the people I love the most in this world.
When I thank God for their union, I’m not even being magnanimous. But I knew it wouldn’t last—that’s not what these guys are for. Which is not to say they can’t be useful in other ways when it comes to marriage. On the night my parents gave a holiday party to celebrate my engagement to the man who would have been my first husband, an old flame—a musician and songwriter of prodigious gifts—turned up at midnight, uninvited, at the front door. Without much of a word, he sat down at the piano. My best friend, already single again by then, called down the street for a guitar she knew my neighbor had gotten for Christmas. The would-be groom went to bed, which should have tipped me off right then and there. The rest of us stayed up past dawn singing impromptu songs written, improbably, about the recent fall of the Soviet Union. One began, “Dubček is a redneck”; another, a take on the great blues classic (at least in my hometown) “Greenville’s Smokin’, Leland’s Burnin’ Down,” referenced (rather starkly) Ceausescu’s leg smoking and Bucharest burning down. I’m sorry, but you can’t help but be crazy about someone who is that agile with both his brain and his picking fingers, especially at that hour of the morning. When he launched into one of my favorites, a song he wrote containing the line “You make me nervous when you lay down beside me,” I realized a particular sort of romance had been missing from my life for a little too long.
The good thing is that these days romance is as easy to call up as tapping the iTunes app (which I did, a lot, in November 2016 during the days after Leonard Cohen’s death). Also, even though all my boyfriends are dropping like flies (the loss of Cohen, Leon Russell, and Glenn Frey in a single year meant a serious depletion of my life’s sound track singers), those left standing are still, valiantly, hard at it. A few years ago, my parents were in Nashville for an event and my mother got wind of the fact that not on
ly were the Rolling Stones staying in their hotel, they were playing the next night at the Vanderbilt Stadium. Mama bribed the doorman for tickets, and my father, mightily fearful that he would have to attend, decamped. I was happily pressed into duty instead and hopped a plane immediately. It was great: Mick did his indefatigable thing, Keith wore a fetching chiffon leopard print duster, and Charlie was as infallibly cool as ever. Afterward we went to Morton’s, split a big piece of rare meat, and toasted our evening with a nice bottle of red. As it happens, Morton’s is very near the old Printer’s Alley. It was that night that I learned all about Otto Bash.
Hello Mother, Hello Father
The summer after my eighth-grade year, the son of close family friends—on whom I’d had an enormous crush forever—got married. He wore seersucker suits and played the guitar, and, the year before, when he had told me he would wait for me, I’d believed him. Upon the announcement of the engagement, I locked myself in my room for three days with a scratchy LP of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 2 (this was far too serious a business for the Carpenters or even Joni Mitchell, both of whom had hits that year). Still bereft, but by now also thoroughly bored, I hatched a plan. I was going to look so good at his wedding I would make that man sorry.
This proved to be easier for a thirteen-year-old than one might think. I had a summer job at our town’s ultrachic department store, Hafter-Blum, fetching coffee and lunch and putting price tags on the frocks. I learned the beauty of a bias cut and the difference between crepe and crepe de chine, and kept an eye out for my wedding showstopper. By late June, when the big day arrived, I’d saved enough of my wages to buy a backless, knife-pleated Cacharel cotton dress with a tiny flower print and a lowish square-cut neckline. I’d heard my mother ordering shoes from Neiman Marcus over the phone so many times I knew the name of her salesman, who sent purchases overnight via the Continental Trailways from Dallas (our early-1970s version of FedEx). He dispatched a pair of creamy snakeskin Charles Jourdans with a three-inch stacked heel I wore well into my twenties. My grandmother, my partner in all things inappropriately sophisticated, sent me diamond earrings and a perfect wide-brimmed straw hat. Needless to say, the groom didn’t notice, and my mother was suitably aghast. No matter. I’d learned a powerful lesson in the healing power of glamour, especially when applied to wounded pride.
Alas, mine was a short-lived transformation. The next morning, instead of a glass slipper, I was given a new pair of Keds and a seat on a Blue Bird bus bound for a Baptist Bible camp in Mentone, Alabama. It was a tragic turn of events that had been engineered by my mother a few months earlier when she announced that she and my father had decided I’d become entirely too cynical for my age. This particular camp, she said, was just the answer; it had done wonders for so-and-so. She knew I would love it. Spoiler alert: I did not love it.
It is worth pointing out that the best antidote for cynicism might not be a decidedly unpicturesque place in the piney woods run by two sanctimonious old ladies who banned comic books on Sundays and served food so bad it required lashings of nasty treacle syrup from ever-present pitchers (thus dashing my hopes that at least I would get really, really skinny). Every morning at dawn we were dragged off to a formation of damp and freezing-cold rocks to pray, and every evening in our cabins we were made to say—out loud—all the things we were thankful for. I hate getting up early, I don’t like a forced march, and it’s nobody’s beeswax what I’m thankful for. Plus, I could never think of a thing to say except the fact that I would one day be getting the hell out of there, which I thought wise to keep to myself.
To be fair, my mother had adored camp. She went to Green Cove and Rockbrook, and she was so convinced the sailing skills she’d learned at Camp Nagawicka had stood the test of time, she once rented us a sailboat at a Disney resort, and we had to be towed back to the dock. All the girls I grew up with couldn’t wait to head off to Kahdalea and Illahee every summer, and even my cousin Frances, who had good reason to be a cynic, looked forward to her six weeks away. (But then she went to a cool camp, Merrie-Woode, where she got to make an actual gold ring instead of a plastic lanyard, a hideous neckpiece I could never master the art of.) I get that I was the odd girl out, but I didn’t find it remotely strange that I preferred hanging out in an air-conditioned store surrounded by beautiful clothes and cool adults rather than a hot cabin with grubby children I didn’t know. My dear friend Libby Page loved Green Cove so much that she and her daughter still attend annual reunions where I swear they sing camp songs. I cannot imagine voluntarily listening to “Kumbaya”; camp even put me off pine trees.
Also, by the time I was packed off to Alabama, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t already had the experience. I’d attended a two-week Girl Scout camp, Cedar Point, in Grenada, Mississippi, for two summers and had gone for a month to a place called Tumbling Waters somewhere in Georgia. So I knew well that camp was full of stuff that made me profoundly uncomfortable: spiders; bunk beds; cold, dark lakes (I prefer my water clear and moving); sleeping on the ground; bows and arrows; girls en masse. Plus, seriously bad things happened while I was gone. My beloved black-and-white cocker spaniel, Buddy (born a week before I was), got run over in our driveway by the cable man, and my riding teacher sold Mary Poppins, the gentle white pony I’d ridden since I was four.
Despite all that, I thought I’d been a pretty good sport about those initial forays until I read the letters home my mother recently unearthed and sent me in a box. In one, from Cedar Point, I reported that my cabinmates were so lame we’d “made a complete flop” of skit night, and that it was so “unbearably” hot I was bound to have “a heat stroke.” Further, I hugely resented having to take “three Girl Scout bites” out of everything including our morning grits, which I despise (unless of course they are mixed with good things like sharp cheddar and jalapeños rather than the camp’s cheap margarine). From Tumbling Waters, I wrote that the girls were “mostly Yankees, snobs, and racists,” and that the much-touted biscuits “are not even as good as the ones Mama gets at Sunflower.” The light in my bottom bunk was so bad I could barely read or write and the tap water so cold it was painful to wash my face. You get the idea—the box is a big one.
Still, there had been a few high points. At Cedar Point, I won a talent show by singing “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” while wearing a trench coat and holding a red flowered umbrella. This begs the question of why I’d thought to include in my trunk an actual Burberry trench, a gift, naturally, from my grandmother. Also, my fervent desire notwithstanding, I am not, in fact, a very good singer. At Tumbling Waters, I made friends with my very cool counselor, Penny from North Carolina, whom I was later allowed to visit at Stephens College, and the pottery bowl I made in arts and crafts still sits on my father’s dresser.
There were no such high points at the Bible camp, just countless moments all but engineered to foster, rather than fight, cynicism. Before a field trip to Six Flags Over Georgia, for example, the ladies called a meeting to declare that since we all came from families of different means, it had been decided that we could take with us no more than $7.35 in spending money, no matter how much we might have stashed in our cabins. How they arrived at that particular number (“in the interest of fairness”) still boggles the mind. Also, our means were hardly that diverse since tuition was, even then, up in the thousands. (Note to my parents: You were robbed.) I myself had stashed a hundred bucks under my (very thin) mattress—I’d been a working girl, after all—and I determined to spend every cent of it after this ludicrous decree. I bought popcorn and cotton candy and fudge for pretty much everyone except the super-righteous chicks I knew to be tattlers. I bought my parents tacky key chains, my little brothers T-shirts and toys and hats I had to hide in my clothes. When we returned and were made to pledge (“before God”) that we’d abided by the rule, I didn’t bat an eye. I knew He’d understand.
In fairly short order I decided to forgive my mother. For one thing, there was a copy of James Taylor’s brand-new Walking
Man LP on my bed when I got home, and the subject of camp was never, ever, brought up again. Also, what I think she finally figured out is that I was never really much of a cynic, just a fairly observant kid healthily attuned to the foibles of human nature. At heart, I’ve always been a romantic. It’s just that to this day I find very little romance in shower shoes, outdoor latrines, and 6:00 A.M. wake-up bells. Fortunately, I had visions of strappy sandals and a swirling, knife-pleated skirt to see me through. The dress still hangs in my closet.
A Moving Experience
“If you want this, you better come get it. Now.” That was my mother, yelling down the phone pretty much every week beginning in October 2016, when she announced that she was selling our family house, until May 2017, when she and my father moved into a nearby new one. The items in question ranged from my childhood country mouse house and the riding boots I’d last worn in the ninth grade to a winged chair and a crusty trumeau mirror I’d always wished was mine. Whatever she didn’t want, she wanted gone, immediately.