by John Lawton
A hip coalition? He was holding out a dream. Wasn’t that what we’d been looking for since about 1952? What did it mean now? A fusion of differences into common cause between his generation and mine?
I have always admired Mailer. I think he was the first who told us what we were—White Negroes. Maybe his hipsters begat the beats, and the beats begat the hippies and the yippies, and maybe somewhere in all that unbiblical begatting I fitted and Mel fitted. All the disaffected. But Mailer was of an identifiable generation. The guys who fought World War Two. I could never see myself as one of them—that would be pretentious—and I don’t know how to define my generation. I never fought in a war. Too young for Korea. Too old for Vietnam. Vietnam was being fought right now by a generation younger than me and Mel. I’m not sure they were represented in that room. I felt they should be. Whatever issue American politics could throw up—even at this level—Vietnam was the ghost in the machine.
People began to leave. Some walking out, some just drifting. Mel went back into a huddle with Mailer and a handful of the loyal. I waited. Ogled Manhattan. Stared at Steinem. And when Mel said, ‘It’s over. Let’s go’ I followed.
He was angry. He said nothing until we were in the elevator going down to the tracks at Clark Street.
‘Chaos,’ he said. ‘Complete fuckin’ chaos.’
There’s a certain homogeneity to what I have learnt to call the Restofamerica. That is, what’s left when you accept that New York is something else as well as someplace else. Restofamerica? Anywhere west of the New Jersey turnpike, east of the San Andreas fault. Capital? Chicago. The capital of everyplace else. I do not by this assertion mean to say that the Restofamerica cannot be factional, racial, whatever—look at Chicago itself for Chrissake, backdrop by Mies van der Rohe, accessories by Smith & Wesson. I mean that it doesn’t seem to me to do it in that microscale, haunch-by-jowl fashion that New York does. Whittle it down to Lubbock, and yes, people find enough reasons to hate each other, but I’ve never felt that the diversity was so broad and so dense—and it’s the combination of the two that makes the difference. The intensity is lacking. In New York every block can make a faction, every gathering of three people dissent.
I saw this difference—Restofamerica versus New York City—crudely illustrated the first time I climbed the steps inside the Statue of Liberty, playing the tourist—no Mel—hoping to dangle from the torch like Robert Cummings at the end of Hitchcock’s Saboteur. Ahead of me, overdressed for the hike, an Hassidic family, Mom, two kids and a folding baby carriage and Dad—homburg, frock coat, string belt, beard. Behind me a 250-pound man in blue jeans and a windbreaker. He leans around me. Taps the Jew on the shoulder.
‘’Scuse me, sir,’ all best Western manners, ‘I’m from Colorado. And I ain’t never seen anyone looks like you before, and I was wonderin’. What kind of a person would you be?’
Good manners counted for little. Dammit, if the guy had been wearing a hat he’d have doffed it. Instead he stood there smiling like a dumb hick and lit the blue touch paper.
‘Whaddya mean what am I? I’m a Jew! You never seen a Jew before?’
‘No, sir,’ he said simply. And I believed him. There may be Jews in Mississippi, and there’s a big community in Galveston—ship heading for Ellis Island, more teeming poor, blown way, way off course. But there are parts of this great country of ours where the nearest thing to a stranger is anyone to whom you are not kin, because the chances are that in your own briarpatch everyone you meet every day is someone to whom you are related. The Restofamerica binds by kin. Kin is a great Restofamerican notion.
I felt I’d seen New York at its most factional. Forget every block is a faction, forget every street—every single goddam New Yorker is a faction. Kinless in the head. I’d been to a typical New York political bash—I’d come out of it without a first idea of what the platform was. I was as wise now as when I went in. Mailer for Mayor. That’s all I knew.
‘What’s the deal?’ I asked Mel.
‘The deal is statehood for New York City.’
I laughed. Just a little. A nervy kind of giggle, heading for an out and out roar, but the look on Mel’s face told me it would be a mistake. He was deadly serious.
‘That’s not exactly an original idea,’ I said. And it wasn’t. I heard it kicked around from time to time ever since I arrived in the city. It slotted neatly into my Restofamerica spiel. It was the absurdist projection of that feeling.
‘Maybe not,’ he said. ‘But it is the idea. And since when have we been slaves to novelty? I thought we were about being right not about being original. If the two pair off, all well and good. But to hammer us for a lack of originality sounds remarkably like the kind of thing my dad used to say whenever I argued with him. It’s a generational thing. They said they wanted us to be original—we wanted to be right—when in reality they just wanted us to be them.’
It was a brief, pointless, adolescent speech—Mel could roll them out by the dozen if you accidentally invoked the spirit of the late Melchior Kissing III—and what it amounted to was another of the great clichés of the times. If you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem. He was calling me out. High Noon on a subway train. So I told him.
‘Last year we were fighting for the soul of a nation. Now, suddenly we’re whittled down to New York City. What’re we doing? Reclaiming America borough by borough? Today New York, tomorrow Hoboken?’
‘It’s a start,’ Mel said. ‘It’s this or nothing.’
‘Last year we were united. We had common cause. Get rid of LBJ. Stop the war. Pull out of Vietnam. I couldn’t see what the cause was tonight, let alone whether it was common. This Left-Right coalition strikes me as a fantasy. Dammit, Mel, the Left cannot agree with themselves—how are they going to find common ground with the right? On an issue as narrow as this? We’ve dissolved. We’re into a feeding frenzy. The Liberals insult the Right, the Blacks insult the Liberals, the Right insult the Blacks, everybody insults the women and so it goes on. You think Rubin understands a damn thing Gloria Steinem says? You think she and Mailer are on the same wavelength?’
‘As ever you are missing the point. You are getting stuck on matters of surface. Try and look deeper. There are battle lines being drawn, to quote Stephen Stills. This is the new battleground. If you think we fought for the soul of America then you’re a bigger romantic than I thought—but if that’s really what you think then we lost the soul of America when Bobby Kennedy got blown away . . .’
‘Mel. We lost it when we let McCarthy get hijacked. Or maybe I should say hibobbied.’
‘If your delivery weren’t so laboured that would be funny. But . . . if we lost it on the national stage the only way back is this way. We can say who runs this city even if we can’t say who runs America.’
‘Hippies talk to feminists?’
‘Yes.’
‘Black bluestocking women talk to beer-belly Irish hustlers?’
‘If you like, yes.’
‘I don’t believe it. And I can’t do it.’
He took off his glasses, breathed on them. Pulled out a shirt tail, wiped ’em clean and shoved them back with that habitual Mel gesture—tip of his big finger pressed against the bridge. If people who wear glasses didn’t wear glasses they’d have to smoke to know what to do with their hands.
‘You can’t walk away from everything, Turner.’
This was way below the belt. So I told him the truth.
‘Mel, I didn’t walk away, I ran.’
It was the best part of a month before I saw him again.
§
Mel had one thing in common with my brother Billy. Looked nothing like him (short, Jewish Mel versus tall, bony—rangy would be the word—brother Billy) but they could both talk the tail feathers off a buzzard. Until I met Mel I’d known no one with a gift for words like Billy. All t
hrough our childhood he dreamed out loud. I heard his version of The Alamo a thousand times—different every time, except that he was always cast as the hero in this dream. I got used to being a supporting player, Gabby Hayes to his Gary Cooper, Ward Bond to his John Wayne. But that dream was one the old man had thrust upon him. Billy, in full, was William Travis Raines, named for the commander of the Alamo. My dad, Sam, was Samuel Houston Raines, his father before him was Samuel Houston Raines, named for the first, the only President of the Republic of Texas. I’ve no idea who John Turner was. I was happy to be John Turner Raines, named for no one, carrying no burden of history. I could, after all, given the old man’s tendency to memorialize, so easily have been David Crockett Raines. And the gags would never have stopped. Every kid in school would of wanted a piece of me for a name like that. I have enjoyed my anonymity. Billy reveled in reflected glory. He wanted the real thing, as big a piece as he could lift and carry, all to himself. I have never met anyone in such a hurry to grow up, no one with that rage to live. He made the six years between us into a generation. I was forever l’il brother. His deputy, sidekick and pupil. I was devastated when he left me. A light had not gone out of my life, a voice had gone silent, a voice that had whispered sweet mischief and adventure in my ear from the day I was born. He left me, took off into the dream and left me, stranded in the Restofamerica.
The Restofamerica we were born into was the Texas Panhandle, the Llano Estacado. The flat plains under the big sky, beyond the Red River, where John Wayne and Montgomery Clift raised a hundred thousand head of cattle. Plenty of people still raised cattle there.
My great-grandfather had settled on the high plains within a few years of the Commanches’ last rout at Palo Duro. He’d set out from St Louis with two wagons, a Radiant Fairblast stove and four bales of Glidden’s Patent Barb Wire, intending to fence himself a piece of California. This was as far as he got. The stove got installed in the cabin—I polished it once a week as a kid—the barbed wire stood out back and rusted. It’s still there today. No one ever moved it. I’d guess there was just about enough to corral one jackass—maybe that’s all he ever meant to fence in, about half an acre. The acreage he staked claim to he never fenced in, and it ran to thousands of acres, hundreds of thousands.
It was not yet a rich man’s country. During the Depression plenty of people seemed no more than just dirt farmers scraping a living off scrubby fields of cotton. Maybe my father could have made money—after all we’d been there as a family since before Lubbock was even started as a township, and we’d gone on buying. We owned even more in 1940 than we’d owned in 1880. Grazing and arable as far as the eye could see and further. Sounds a lot, but there are ranches in the Panhandle closer to a million acres, and it was out beyond the point where any railroad would ever run or anyone else ever want to live. Wrong side of town and wrong side of tracks that never came. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe (the second ‘the’ of the song title is entirely optional and strictly for purposes of metre), which quartered Lubbock like sliced pizza, passed us by. The interstate, when it finally arrived, passed us by. We were country—further out, thank God, than the reach of any country club. The town would never come out to meet us. Our development potential was zero. My father complicated his life. He’d commit to nothing fully. Some cattle, some cotton, never as much as the land would hold and never enough attention to either. If money came in it soon went out—cattle got bought and bred, then sold too cheap, crops got planted, then neglected in the fields. Got to the point where he’d hired and laid off the help so many times there was not a man in the county who’d work for Sam Raines anymore. That was my old man. Always struggling to make ends meet. Bound in chains to a crazy scheme of his own.
In the 1930s, when Billy and I were born, no one had found much oil around Lubbock. The first local strike had been in Yoakum County to the south around 1927 or ’28, but there’d been strikes around Borger and Pampa, up near the Oklahoma line, as far back as 1920 or ’21. As Lubbockians saw it the plain fact was that no one had struck oil as far north and as far west as Sam was looking. During the Depression, when the worst dust storms in living memory swept through, most people gave up looking. Not Sam. Sam said he’d hit it for sure. Everyone he knew said, ‘That’ll be the day’ but that’s Lubbockians for you.
By the end of the war Dallas and Galveston had grown rich on the oil trade, and there’d been drilling aplenty and new fortunes made all around Midland and Odessa—and a couple of counties north in Hutchinson County, or south in Gaines, the plains were forest-thick with derricks. But my old man was a crank, mocked by his neighbors for daring to think he might strike it lucky, mocked for the time he’d wasted, the money he’d lost looking for a gusher on his farm. I often think it was that made Billy as bold as he was. Standing up for the old man’s failures. Outtalking, outshouting anyone who thought Sam Raines’ twenty-third or thirty-third borehole a fit subject for a joke. I just got used to it. Said nothing. My old man was my old man. Drilling for oil on an empty plain of scrub northwest of Lubbock was by no means the crankiest thing about him.
I was not embarrassed by our father. I liked where we lived. I loved our farm. In the shadow of the one feature that broke that endless horizon—a vast shale plug that sat out on the plains less as though it had risen from the earth, more as though it had tumbled from the sky. You could see it from miles around. It meant you could always see home. You could see home before you even cleared the city limits. There was no such thing as a skyscraper to get in the way—although there was sky to scrape aplenty. I loved the four room wooden shack my great-grandfather had built in 1881. He’d built there because the plug of rock cast a shadow that kept the heat of the day off the house. It was, it still is, called Bald Eagle Rock because nothing grows on it, but I never once saw a bald eagle there. I could stand up there and dream. It’s a family trait. Billy would stand up there and dream into words, and if I’d heard enough that day I’d just turn off to him and watch the sails on the windmill turn.
When I was seven my mother took sick and died. It was the day Japan surrendered. Left with two boys my father was lost. Widowered at forty-two, he had no idea how to handle it or us. I remember my first day back at school after the funeral—he’d made up my lunchbox for the first time. A bar of chocolate and an unripe apple hard as a bullet. Vitamins, proteins, nutrition meant nothing to him. Kids just grew. All you had to do was stoke ’em. It should not have surprised either of us that day in 1948 when he came back from a trip to Tucumcari and brought with him his new wife—Lois, nineteen years old, tall and tan and beautiful, without a doubt part Indian, and a shock to the system. She knelt down and hugged me. At ten years old I was still a runt of a child. She could wrap me up and smother me in her arms and breasts. Billy was sixteen, and a tad under six feet tall. He forestalled the embrace, stuck out a hand for her to shake. Lois smiled and took the hand. Told Billy how Sam never stopped talking about him.
That evening, halfway up the mountain, watching the sunset, Billy had stopped talking.
How to describe a West Texas sunset? Well, first off you will run out of vocabulary down the pink to red to purple end of the spectrum. You will find yourself splitting words like frog hairs—pinky-red, reddish-blue, magenta drifting to maroon (not that I ever met a Texan who described anything as magenta) and so on. Let me say as simply as I saw it that the evening sky just glowed, soft and slow, it glowed until the sun vanished over the far, far horizon.
After an hour or so I had to ask.
And Billy said, ‘What’s wrong? What the hell do you think is wrong? The old man comes home with a store-bought wife, tells us she’s our new mom and you ask what’s wrong.’
The old man had not said that. It would have been the cliché from every other Western if he had, but he hadn’t. Hadn’t even called her ‘Mom’. Introduced her as Lois and told us how they’d fallen in love and married in three days. He hadn’t been looking for a wife. But I wa
s baffled by the notion that you could buy a wife in a store. I asked how much Lois had cost. Ever the educator, Billy explained the phrase. Didn’t talk to me like I was an idiot. And lapsed back into that untypical, unimaginable silence. The old man called to us in the darkness, voice booming out below us, bouncing back off the rock to echo across the plains. We climbed down, Billy still not speaking. Lois had milk and cookies laid out for us. I got used to Lois. Never called her Mom, never had to. I’d gotten another best friend. After Billy Lois was my best friend. After he went my only friend for a while. I liked Lois, immediately. But Billy loved her. Took days for him to realize this, and years for me to notice.
§
1969. Mel rang me at my office on Lafayette and Spring. A voice to whisper mischief.
‘You busy?’
‘Kind of.’
‘You working?’
‘Er . . . I’m in the middle of a case.’
A lie. I was twiddling my thumbs waiting on anything to happen.
‘Can you come to a couple of meetings?’
‘A couple?’
‘There’s one out in Queens . . .’
‘Mel. I am not going to Queens. Not for you, not for Norman Mailer, not for anyone.’