Little Boy Blues

by Malcolm Jones

  Our life together was one of unvarying routines, tightly scripted with no room for improvisation. The first Christmas after I learned to read and write in school, Mother wrote out thank-you notes to everyone who had given me a present and then had me copy them. When I grew old enough to compose the notes myself, she proofread every one before sealing the envelopes. She subjected herself to the same discipline. A great greeting-card giver—she kept a complete file, constantly updated, of the birthdays and anniversaries of everyone she knew—she rarely sent a card that did not include a personal message, sometimes covering the inside and back of the card. She composed each of these messages on a legal pad, writing and rewriting before she transferred the finished product to the card, then she kept the rough drafts from one year to the next to ensure that she conveyed a different sentiment with each succeeding year. It never occurred to her that other people might not keep all the cards they received, as she did, bundling them in a rubber band and stashing them in a drawer, to be pulled out and read again and again.

  Every day of the week had its apportioned chores and duties. There was a day for grocery shopping and a day for the laundromat. Saturday morning we cleaned the apartment together (and the parakeet got a morning out of his cage, until the day I forgot that the bird was out and opened the front door to sweep out the dust and watched Pretty Boy soar away forever). Saturday nights we spent eating Chef Boyardee spaghetti with my mother’s friend Ethel. Sunday morning Mother got us to church, and in the afternoon we climbed back in the car and went visiting. Monday night was Boy Scouts. Wednesday night was her choir practice. On Thursday afternoon, she took me along with her to the beauty parlor.

  Of all the places I went with my mother, the beauty parlor was my favorite. I even liked that sinus-clearing chemical smell that permeated the air when someone was getting a permanent. Marinza was the hairdresser’s name—it burned in bright neon red against the twilight right over the front door—and until I was ten or eleven, I thought Marinza was one of those people with just one name, like Liberace or Popeye. I was crushed when I found out she was Marinza Sellers (by day, maybe, but by night—Marinza!). The romance ended with her name, though. Tall and thin, she was no-nonsense and plainspoken and she never smiled. “That woman always says just what she thinks!” my mother often exclaimed with a shake of her freshly coiffed head as we drove away. I never knew quite what to think of that. Did she mean that you shouldn’t say what you thought? What happened to always telling the truth, even when it hurt, a sentiment of my mother’s with which I was painfully familiar? I decided that she meant that Marinza was saying things about my mother’s friends that offended my mother. When I asked one time, she switched gears effortlessly—another familiar tactic—and said I should always be honest, but that I should keep my own counsel. When I ask what that meant, she started talking about Robert E. Lee. General Lee was a saint in our house, along with Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart, although Stuart, with his flying locks and pink-lined cape and his way with the ladies, was rarely held up as a role model. General Lee, though, was, if not perfect, then certainly right up there with the apostles. He always did what his mother asked. He loved the Union, but he was loyal to his home state. And he always took responsibility for everything, even when it hurt.

  “What did Lee say after Gettysburg?” Mother asked.

  “I know.”

  “I know you know, but let’s hear it.”

  “This is all my fault.”

  “That’s right. Just remember, sugar, the South had the best generals, and if they’d had the equipment they needed, like the North did, they would have won that war.”

  I was eight when the Civil War centennial began in 1960. This was big news in our household, at least for my mother and me. That war, which Mother always called the War Between the States, was our war. “Your great-grandfather rode with Wade Hampton,” she taught me, and sometimes she would bring out the quilt that had been buried when our ancestors thought that General Sherman was on his way (he turned northeast instead, sparing the Floyds and Joneses and their belongings). My father, having been in a war of his own, viewed all this excitement with wry silence. The only time I ever heard him say anything about the Civil War came one night at supper after we’d listened to my mother run through her usual litany about Wade Hampton and the quilt and what a good Presbyterian Stonewall Jackson had been. He leaned over to me conspiratorially and said, “You know what Nathan Bedford Forrest always said, don’t you? Get there fustest with the mostest.” That convulsed me, much to the irritation of my mother.

  I have sometimes wondered if the centennial was celebrated purely for the benefit of toymakers, at least in our part of the country, where they did a thriving business in Civil War flags, kepis (those weird little caps with the round, flat tops) and replicas of muskets and sidearms used in the war. I remember getting one of the muskets, complete with cork balls that the manufacturer claimed could be fired with the propulsion of a Greenie Stickem Cap (caps—paper loaded with a tiny gunpowder charge—usually came in rolls that were inserted in cowboy revolvers, but the stick-on kind were unitary, with one side having enough adhesive to stick to a toy gun right under a hammer). The cork balls never went anywhere, but they made good-looking pretend ammo. The high-water mark of my place in the pecking order of our neighborhood came one summer when I returned from vacation with my aunt and uncle, who had taken me to Gettysburg, where they bought me a little cotton-lined plastic case that held a minié ball, which I still own, and a rifled bullet taken from the battlefield. But the neighbor kid we all envied the most had a Civil War cannon made of black plastic. It stood about two feet tall and had wheels that rolled, and the barrel had some kind of spring device that, when you yanked the lanyard, actually shot a plastic cannonball about ten feet.

  All of this was mere preamble to what I, under my mother’s tutelage, believed to be the climax of the centennial celebration: the re-release of Gone with the Wind. This, she convinced me, was the greatest movie ever made, and Scarlett O’Hara was the symbol of the South. Years later, Scarlett and Vivien Leigh would become interchangeable in my mother’s mind, and she inveighed mightily against the actress, who was said, according to Mother, to have had “sexual relations with tradesmen,” thereby besmirching the reputation of Southerners everywhere.

  For weeks prior to the movie’s release, Mother coached me in the particulars of the story and its characters: long-suffering Melanie, rapscallion Rhett, wise old Mammy (who inspired Mother’s most misbegotten arias about the benign nature of slavery: “the colored folks were just like family”) and the clueless Prissy (“I don’t know nothing about birthing babies,” a quote I was sick of the second time I heard it). My mother so loved Gone with the Wind that she even permitted my father a brief moment of glory: “I’ll bet you didn’t know that your daddy went to the premiere in Atlanta” (this occurred while she was still intent on making me see his good points; later she would always point out, whenever I brought up the premiere story, that he was also busy flunking out of college in his first and only semester).

  I don’t know what I expected, but when the movie finally came to town, I was sorely disappointed. There was way too much romance and not nearly enough fighting. Characters did things for reasons I couldn’t understand. People were admired who did what I had been taught were unadmirable things: Scarlett’s father drank; Rhett ran out on her. I managed to stay awake until the battle of Atlanta, but the last thing I remember before falling asleep was a soldier getting his leg sawed off. Someone woke me up before the end, in time to hear Rhett cuss and Scarlett do her “As God is my witness” number, but by then I knew there was nothing there for me, nothing we could take into the backyard, nothing to recreate. Mother, though, was in heaven. For days she went on and on about Scarlett, much to my puzzlement. I could not, for the life of me, understand why anyone would put up with that woman, much less hold her up as admirable, adorable, enviable. Indomitable? OK, I saw that. But she was also whiny self-cente
red, capricious and crazy about a man with too much sense to stay under the same roof with her. Years later, I would marvel at my mother’s utter lack of self-awareness in identifying so loudly with this self-absorbed twit. At the time, I just remember wondering why she went on so about Scarlett’s foolish choice in choosing Rhett Butler over the reliably devoted Ashley Wilkes.

  • • •

  Marinza’s beauty parlor took up the basement floor of a two-story flatiron building that housed the local drugstore. It was always gloomy in there, because the one big room was half underground with little basement windows that didn’t let in much light. Going down the half-dozen steps from the street, you entered a room that felt like a cave and smelled like a laboratory, a sensation underscored by the sight of four or five of those big nose-cone hair dryers against the far wall. Surely strange experiments went on there. To the right as you entered were the mirrors and the sinks and the big upholstered chrome chairs for the patrons getting the works. That was the only well-lit part of the low-ceilinged room. It was a little like a stage, with Marinza and her customers as the performers, trading gossip instead of dialogue. Sometimes there were two beauty operators working under lights, but usually Marinza worked alone. She’d have one customer in the chair and one or two more going under the dryers. The dryers made so much noise that you couldn’t hear what the beauty operators were saying to their customers getting a perm or a shampoo and set. It was like watching television with a vacuum cleaner running.

  I was usually an audience of one, back in the dark, on one of the waiting-area chairs covered in shiny, cracked maroon leatherette. You had to remember to sit up straight in those chairs, because if you slumped, you slid, and because the seats were so slick, you just kept going right to the floor. But I didn’t give Marinza or anything else about her beauty parlor much thought. I was too busy poring over her vast collection of movie magazines. There were a couple of rickety lamps beside the chairs, and in the middle of the room a squat round formica-covered table heaped with movie magazines. While my mother got her shampoo and set, I did my homework as fast as I could so I could browse those magazines with a clear conscience. It is almost impossible to give anyone who was not alive in the sixties a credible idea of what those magazines were like. To start with, you have to understand that gossip that today is spread across the mainstream media—from television to newsweeklies—was then confined to periodicals that were one step above sleazy and sometimes not even a step. The National Enquirer had been around since 1926, but in the fifties and early sixties, it was still struggling for a toehold on the public’s awareness. The days in which you could easily buy such a rag in the grocery store were several years away, and the Enquirer’s fare was not gossip but prurience and shock (I CUT OUT HER HEART AND STOMPED ON IT! was a famous headline from 1963). If you wanted gossip about movie stars, you had to read Modern Screen or Photoplay or one of the several other magazines whose trade was tattle. The tattle they peddled was, by current standards, astonishingly tame. In those days, divorce was still exotic enough to make the cover, and it is a measure of the buttoned-down tone of the time that such news never made the papers. Respectable news outlets didn’t have gossip columnists, unless you count the watered-down musings of Hollywood hacks like Earl Wilson. If you wanted real dirt, you had to read the movie magazines, and I came in right at the golden age.

  Elizabeth Taylor was breaking up Eddie Fisher’s marriage to Debbie Reynolds, a story that played out for months. LIZ STOLE MY EDDIE, A TEARFUL DEBBIE CRIES. Things kicked into overdrive when Liz dumped Eddie and ran off with Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra, breaking up his marriage in the bargain. Sitting there in the near dark, I kept up with the whole thing from start to finish, and it was the best stuff I’d ever read, much better than Boy’s Life or Reader’s Digest or Guidepost (a Christian magazine, pamphlet sized, that contained inspirational stories and which it had been my goal to write for—I figured I could write stories with messages as well as anybody). Those were the only magazines Mother allowed in our apartment. But the movie magazines were even better than the funnies, which had, until then, been my gold standard for daily entertainment. The best part was that to finish any of these lurid accounts, you had to flip to the back of the magazines, which were filled with sleazy advertisements for Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie and Mark Eden bust-developer cream. These ads were illustrated with line drawings that showed an endless succession of pneumatic young women in various stages of undress—filmy nightgowns and bras the likes of which I had certainly never seen when I’d been dragged along on my mother’s shopping expeditions. And the best part was, I didn’t have to hide anything. (When we went to the grocery store, I hung out by the magazine rack while my mother shopped, and there, a year or so later, I discovered Playboy, which I examined by hiding it behind another, bigger magazine; unfortunately, the only magazine bigger than Playboy was Bride.) In Marinza’s, though, I got to further my education in naughty sex and adultery right out in the open.

  We would exit the beauty parlor, Mother waiting while I held the door for her, then both of us blinking like owls in the light of day. I always felt as though these trips were a waste, or a mistake of some kind, because I liked the way my mother looked before she got her hair done, afterward not so much. She went from being soft, slightly disarrayed, vulnerable, to hard-edged and controlled down to the last follicle. I came to think of it as Mother’s getting her hair tightened. Whenever I looked across at her on the way home, I would stare at the bronze curl in front of her ear and almost flinch. It looked like something screwed onto the side of her head. In that sense, it was in keeping with everything else about her: fixed, controlled, rigid. Sometimes I wanted to tap it, to see if it would shatter.

  The last time Eddie’s girlfriend called, I didn’t plan to take the telephone receiver out of Mother’s hand. I just reached out and took it. I had the receiver to my ear before I realized what I’d done. “Who is this?” I asked, and the sound of my own voice through the phone shocked me. For the first time, I heard the deepness, a coarseness almost.

  “Who is this?” the coy voice on the other end asked.

  “Never you mind who this is. You leave this woman alone. Do you understand that? Don’t be calling here anymore.”

  “I don’t know who you are—” the caller said but I cut her off.

  “Shut up and listen. You’re a sick woman, and you’ve got no business calling here. Do it again, you’ll be sorry.”

  Before she could say anything, I hung up on her, and a good thing, too, because I was running out of tough-guy movie dialogue. But that was all right, because I had believed what I was saying when I said it and I pulled it off. There was no thinking, no second-guessing.

  When I put the receiver in the cradle, it almost slipped out of my hand, and I saw the sweat on my palm. I turned to my mother, sitting crumpled in the cane-bottomed chair beside the phone. She looked up at me with a little smile on her face, but my giddiness stalled when I looked into her eyes and saw the confusion. For a second, I thought she was afraid of me.

  We decided we would see Cleopatra when it came to town. It had been out for months, of course, because until downtown collapsed for good, losing trade first to shopping centers and then to malls and the multiplexes that sprang up beside them like mushrooms after rain, there were only two or three movie theaters in Winston-Salem. Months went by between the time a movie opened in the big cities and its appearance in our town. The reviews had been terrible, but my mother and I never went to a movie based on a review. We went to see stars we liked (Charlton Heston, Paul Newman, Julie Andrews—which was how we happened to see The Americanization of Emily together, which was the first movie I remember sitting through in discomfort because I was seeing Julie Andrews in bed with James Garner and my mother was sitting beside me) or because we were interested in the story. We had been talking about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton for months before the movie opened (by the time Cleopatra came to town, they were divo
rced from their respective spouses and married to each other). My mother, of course, had taken Sybil Burton’s side—no one ever took Eddie Fisher’s side, poor Eddie—and at first, I agreed with her. Then, gradually, I began to side with Richard Burton. I don’t know why, exactly. I didn’t care about Elizabeth Taylor, didn’t know why anyone would. The whole thing baffled me, to tell the truth, why a man would leave his wife for another woman. I was eleven, what did I know? Elizabeth Taylor was beautiful, all right, although, as my mother was quick to point out, she had a weight problem. But I understood about taking sides. You had to be for the Yankees or against them, for the Beatles or for the Rolling Stones. So I sided with Richard Burton, which upset my mother, even when I explained that Burton was smart, funny, handsome (“Oh, honey, that complexion”)—all right, ruggedly handsome then, and by all reports a great actor (which I had by then put at the top of my career choices, exing out architect as architect had exed out preacher). Burton was hands down the most interesting member of the triangle. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make my mother come around. That he reminded me a little of my father I kept entirely to myself. I had made that mistake before, more than once. First it was Christopher Plummer. Then Paul Newman. My mother bore these observations with considerable grace. But then again, as she herself was moved to observe on more than one occasion, my father really did look like a movie star.

  When the movie finally got to town, neither of us liked it. I was surprised, because it seemed the sort of movie I should have liked, full of centurions and Roman legions and battles; maybe by then I had overdosed on sword-and-sandal movies, although I would have said that was impossible. Specifically, I thought the ending was lousy. Liz and Dick went down to defeat and twitchy Roddy McDowall was the victor. My mother thought they got what they deserved. It never occurred to either of us that it was supposed to be a tragedy.