Clear Springs (19 page)

At school, the Hilltoppers were my secret. In Mayfield, I was an outcast, but in the greater world I could be suave and self-important. It was as though I could slip into a telephone booth and change into my National President cape, ready to assume my powerful role. When d.j.s interviewed me, I spoke glibly in
Billboard
lingo. “Well, Ed, this new platter is slated to be a chart-buster,” I said to Ed Bonner on KXOK, in St. Louis. I had my own stationery, with a Hilltoppers logo. After Miss Florence’s edict, I immersed myself in my presidential duties, publishing my bimonthly newsletter,
Hilltoppers Topics
. Running a fan club was expensive, but the Hilltoppers sent me ten dollars a week for expenses and fifteen dollars a week for myself. I saved all my money for college. I started hating math.

My mother had been serious about those Tony Martin suits. Shortly before my graduation, the Hilltoppers came to Mayfield, and Mama whisked them off to the Merit and got them measured. They picked
out an off-white material with a subtle gray stripe in it. Later, when the suits were finished, Mama went to the Merit and personally sewed in the labels. That spring, I was a soda jerk at the Rexall drugstore in Mayfield, making fifty cents an hour, and after school that day I was drawing a Coke from the fountain for one of the regulars when all four of the Hilltoppers strolled into the store. It was my big moment. I could show them off. A classmate of mine, a popular cheerleader—an uptown girl who always made me feel like a shabby bumpkin—was testing nail polish at the cosmetics counter. I rushed over and told her I would introduce her to the Hilltoppers. “They’re here,” I said, pointing to the end of the counter, where I had served them Cokes.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said, flashing her cheerleader smile. “I wouldn’t know what to say.” With two fingernails painted Persian Melon, she hurried out the back door. The Hilltoppers scared her.

It was a triumph, sort of. I got off work early, and the Hilltoppers drove me home in the Cadillac. Mama made a huge catfish supper, with hush puppies and slaw and blackberry pie, and that evening my family and I all went to Paducah and saw the Hilltoppers sing at the National Guard Armory with Blue Barron’s orchestra. It was a perfect day. “Your mother is an amazing woman,” Don said to me.

The Hilltoppers were so conventional, such nice guys. I didn’t know how to talk to them about the crazy thoughts in my head. I had just received a reply to my letter to George Adamski, the man who claimed in his book about UFOs to have been on a spaceship to Venus. He thanked me for writing and assured me that he had indeed been to Venus, but he failed to answer my questions about the spacecraft’s interior and the landscape of Venus.

That summer, I picked blackberries in the early-morning dew with rock-and-roll songs like “Get a Job” by the Silhouettes and Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” blasting in my mind, and in the afternoons I trudged down the dusty lanes through the fields with the current dog to round up the herd of cows. In the evenings, I worked at the Rexall. I went out with boys—boys who wanted to settle down and work in the new factories—but I wasn’t impressed. I was always dreaming. From our house I could see the traffic on Highway 45, which ran straight south to Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis was born. I knew he had dreamed the same dreams.

Miss Florence refused to write me a recommendation to Duke University, where I wanted to study parapsychology with the famous Dr. J. B. Rhine, so in the fall I went away to the University of Kentucky, in
Lexington. I neglected my fan-club duties and failed to get
Hilltoppers Topics
out on schedule. I read
Brave New World
and
1984
and
Mandingo
and
Elmer Gantry
. I studied French and psychology and philosophy and volleyball. After hours, I still listened to John R jive-talking along with Ruth Brown and Little Walter and Jimmy Reed. Buddy Holly died that winter. Elvis was in the Army.

A year later, I saw the Hilltoppers for the last time, at a nightclub in Louisville, where they were performing with Mel Tormé. I had driven over with some girls from U.K. The Hilltoppers’ popularity had declined drastically. They were being eclipsed by rock-and-roll. In their tuxedos or in their Tony Martin suits, they never really got the hang of it. I remember Don and Seymour sitting at a table in a corner with me that night in Louisville. They were as kind as ever—funny and generous, the way I always remember them. I had on a black cocktail dress with a taffeta balloon-hem. “Those U.K. boys better watch out,” Don said, teasing me.

Shyly, I told them about breaking up with my boyfriend. He was going with some other girl and my life was in ruins, but I didn’t go into detail. I apologized for letting my club work slip. The newsletter was two months late.

Don smiled. “It’s about time you forgot about the fan club,” he said.

“No, it’s not,” I said loyally.

“You’ll have other interests,” he said. “You’ll get married, and have your own family.”

“I don’t know.” I thought I would never get married.

“People change and go on to something else,” Don said. “We won’t stay with this forever. It’s no way to live—one dinky ballroom after another. Traveling around all the time isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.”

“Even in a Cadillac?” I asked.

“Even in a Cadillac,” Don said, smiling again. “By the way, we’ll drop you off in Lexington tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” I said. It was my last chance to travel in their Cadillac, I thought—a good way to end my national presidency. They had traded in the blue Fleetwood for a newer, black model. I imagine it even now, rushing through the night, unrestrained in its flight, charging across America.

It was after midnight when Mel Tormé finished his set, but the band
wouldn’t quit. The crowd was wild. Jimmy took the microphone again. He sang “I Can’t Get Started,” a droopy-drawers sort of song. He had had a couple of drinks, and he was in mellow spirits. Then he eased into “St. James Infirmary.” As the deep sadness of the song emerged, he suddenly became real to me, not a star. “St. James Infirmary” was slow and bluesy, but it wasn’t a droopy-drawers song. It was the meanest, low-downest, saddest song I ever heard. I thought I would die. It was after hours, way down South in Dixie. It was 1959.

Then came the sixties. The rolling stone of history knocked me down, rolled me over, and pushed me out. At the University of Kentucky I declared myself a math major, as Miss Florence had directed, then tuned out when calculus departed from charming puzzles to dull engineering applications involving bridges and water towers. I wandered among majors. Learning was like a buffet, and I wanted to devour everything. Indiscriminately, I sampled etymology, existentialism, the theater of the absurd, Shakespeare, French symbolists, realism, naturalism, logic, Jack Kerouac. Dada and surrealism followed my Rimbaud period. I didn’t consult a guidance counselor. One of my primary traits—coming from the independent spirit of generations of farm people—was the refusal to seek advice or ask directions. I preferred to blunder along, exactly the way Daddy did on the occasions when he and Mama drove me to school in Lexington. Sometimes on the way home they would take a side trip, blazing trails. Daddy wouldn’t consult a map.

No one told me what to do. Nobody talked about where learning was headed, what it was for. As far as I knew, it was meant to be nothing more than a reprieve from the necessity of labor. I knew I would have to get a job after college, and I had shorthand and typing from high school to bank on. I figured I would go to a city. I would not work outdoors. I would work in an office or a store. I couldn’t imagine that anybody would pay me to read or write the kind of books I cared about. Still, after discovering Thomas Wolfe and J. D. Salinger, I switched my major to English. Miss Florence was not there to make me mind, so I rushed headlong into the dangers of literature.

And without a second thought, I moved to New York the day after graduation. I craved change and excitement—and all the tourist attractions.
Going to the big city did not seem bold or brave to me. It merely seemed inevitable. New York had burned its authority into my brain long ago, when I watched Elvis Presley on
The Ed Sullivan Show
and listened to Martin Block’s
Make-Believe Ballroom
from WABC, broadcast on an affiliate station. I had been to New York once, on a school trip my sophomore year at U.K. Our group toured the United Nations, the Bowery, and Broadway, and we heard beatnik poetry at a coffeehouse, the Gaslight. My college creative-writing teacher, Robert Hazel, insisted on New York. He booted his students right out of the provinces. “Get out of this backwater Podunk,” he urged. “Go get some experience. You can’t be a writer unless you’ve lived intensely.” New York was the place.

Robert Hazel was a seductive personality, an engaging man who made all his students believe they could be writers. We fell for his romantic portrait of the artist. Professor Hazel had published books. His photograph on one of the jackets was a brooding, handsome profile. He emulated F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was my literary hero. For all of his writing students, Professor Hazel embodied the glamour of the writing life. He frequently talked about “Bill” Styron and “Phil” Roth, as if they were old buddies of his. He spoke knowledgeably of jazz and art. He would tell what Miles said to Coltrane at some bar in such a way that you thought he was in thick with them.

So I headed to New York. There, I thought, I could get a job in an office, working at a typewriter, while I checked out the Greenwich Village scene and gathered material—gritty street life, colorful characters—to write about. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I thought I didn’t have much to write about yet. In New York I would soak up life, as Robert Hazel—and Louisa May Alcott—had said, and take notes. In any case, I would not have to pick blackberries again.

I got a ride to New York with a Cuban woman who had been visiting her family in Lexington. In the trunk of her car, I stowed my matching set of blue Samsonite luggage and my long file drawer of notes. Several of my college friends planned to join me in the city within the next few weeks. I checked into the Hotel Taft on Times Square, and the next day I went straight to the Museum of Modern Art to see the fabulous paintings I had just studied in my art-history course. I was spellbound; the paintings really existed—Picassos and Cézannes and Pollocks. Professor Hazel had spoken knowingly of contemporary artists like Motherwell and Kline, as if he had been in their studios at moments of great inspiration. I was surprised that up
close the paintings had so many blemishes and irregularities. Seeing them was like spotting movie stars without their makeup. At the museum café I met a man who promised to call me. That afternoon he had to go visit his mother’s grave or he would have asked me for a date right there, he said. He did leave me a message later at the hotel desk, but I didn’t return his call.

I knew no one in New York. I wasn’t used to walking on sidewalks in high heels. My feet were killing me. A creepy man followed me down Broadway, muttering to me. He followed me into a shoe store where I bought a pair of low-heeled shoes. There, he became bored with me and drifted off. In my new shoes, I charged down Broadway, enclosed in a throng, with buses whooshing by. It was summer. The trash bins on the streets were painted gold that year, with Miss Rheingold ads.

I had no prospects, no contacts, not even a résumé or letter of introduction. However, I had one possibility. During one semester in college,
Life
magazine had hired me to write a weekly advertising column for the student newspaper. My column, “Bobbie Mason Looks at Life,” previewed the coming week’s
Life
. I hoped this would lead to a writing job. The Time-Life Building was my favorite building so far, with its fountains and breezy plaza. A brisk young woman in personnel told me that unfortunately Time-Life had no writing or editorial openings, but she talked to me for an hour, offering me guidance and job-hunting tips. “Call me if you need help,” she said. People were exceptionally friendly in New York, I thought.

I studied the classified ads and went to a publishing house that advertised for an editorial assistant, but that position required two years of publishing experience. All the jobs advertised seemed to require experience. Although I had a stringbook of my college newspaper pieces and had minored in journalism, it never occurred to me to present myself to
The New York Times
. I was sure I needed more experience to write for a large newspaper.

I applied for several clerical jobs, then answered an ad for a secretarial job at a synthetic textiles (Acrilan and nylon) company. It paid a hundred dollars a week. The personnel manager was from North Carolina, and she was enthusiastic about me.

“Do you play Scrabble?” she asked.

“I never have. Why?”

“It’s a prerequisite,” she said with a smile. “All the girls play it at lunch.”

She sent me in to talk to the vice president, a dour pear-shaped man with hair that fell onto his forehead in wads. He was dutifully garbed in his synthetics. He jabbered about his company for a while, and I pondered his dark surroundings. He reminded me of a groundhog in its hole. After reviewing my typing test, he offered me the job.