Milking the Moon (13 page)

I never planted any trees when I was in the CCC camp. The minute they saw that I had actually been through high school and had an IQ, they put me to work teaching. I taught beginner’s arithmetic. Of all the things for me.

I also helped in the forestry office making the identity cards for all the guys who couldn’t read or write. Then they realized that I could paint. We had had a couple of storms, so they needed these “Bridge Out” signs. They had these rules—Corps of Engineers Specifics, I think it was called—and it showed how to paint a Corps of Engineers sign. The capital letters had to be precisely so many inches high, and the boards had to be so many feet. The background was orange, and you could only use black letters. Not my kind of creative work. They put me in this open shed—cold—my God, was it cold. I had sixteen layers of wool underwear and gloves painting “Bridge Out” and “Turn Left” and “Detour 3 Miles.” The one I really liked—“Soft Shoulders.”

Then I painted baby coffins. They had a terrible infant mortality rate in the backwoods, you know. So there was always some guy who would come in with a wooden box. They were all shy. In the way of the backwoods, they wouldn’t take a seat, they would just squat down. When they go to town, to talk on the front porch of the store, they just squat like Orientals, like Hindus. They just squatted. Then they would take a little cotton bag of tobacco out of their back pocket and roll a cigarette, pulling it closed with the corner of their mouths somehow. They would squat there with this coffin and this cigarette and say, looking at the ground, not looking in my eyes, “Howdy, Painty.” I was known as Painty. I would say, “Well, hey. How are you doing?” They would say, “He died early this morning.” And there would be pauses that lasted for centuries. “I thought maybe you’d do like you did for Jim, m’brother.” I said, “Sure, I’ll paint it for you. Just come back tomorrow morning and it will be ready.” So, after I finished my things, I would paint the baby coffin white. I had some tubes of colors, so I could paint a little raise of flowers and the baby’s name. They thought that was great. I must have painted a hundred baby coffins between “Detour” and “Soft Shoulders.”

I could have renewed in the CCC, but I was homesick for Mobile. So I came back and got a job ushering at the Saenger Theater. I had this dapper red, rather military uniform, sort of like a brown-and-tan version of West Point. Tight trousers, stripes. I had to have my hair cut short and parted, very prissy proper, with a bow tie. Once when I was walking in my usher’s costume across Bienville Square, I heard this voice say, “Jesus Christ, if it ain’t Painty.” There was this boy called Biggun from the CCC. He had a phenomenal penis. I mean, when he went into the shower everybody just came and stood around. We just wanted to see what it looked like. It was something. He had sort of a slight body build—all his strength had gone to one place. It was rather sad because the whores in Laurel wouldn’t have him. They took one look and ran screaming. So the CCC boys had to take turns masturbating him when he came back from town desperate. They would say, “It’s your turn this week,” “No, it was my turn last week.” But they would take him in the shower and soap him up.

He told me he had joined the navy and was glad he had been asked to go to Panama because he’d heard about these nightclub acts in Panama where the girls are humped by donkeys. And he thought if there were girls in Panama who could take donkeys, they could take him. I said, “I hope you have a grand time in Panama.” Had he known how to write, I would have given him my address so he could tell me everything. I thought of him often. I hope some kind soul introduced him to the showgirls in Panama.

*

I worked at the Saenger Theater for a year. I watched Joan Crawford in
Strange Cargo
twenty-seven times. I saw Vera Zorina in
The Goldwyn Follies
twenty-two times. And as for Fred Astaire and Ginger—oh, Lord—you know.

Then I went to work for the U.S. Corps of Engineers. This was the beginning of what was called preparedness. The Corps of Engineers was at an office downtown, and it turned out that the man who was running one of the departments was an old friend of Mr. Gayfer’s and also an old friend of mine. We had known him forever. He had even known my grandparents. Charming guy. He said, “Well, I have a job for you. You know how to wrap packages, don’t you? This is kind of a special thing. You are going to be in that cellar. You will wrap secret, confidential materials because we send the plans for these airports we are building all over Alabama—we send them double-wrapped. They are wrapped as tacky packages to go in the post. Inside they are waterproof and secret.” The outside had to look like something Granny would mail to her son in construction work in Huntsville. So I did artistic packages. I made them all look tacky and took them to the post office.

That was when I lived in the ballroom of the Rubira house. This was a beautiful old downtown house of the Spanish family Rubira. Built after the Civil War, I think, or maybe just before. This was the first house to have gas because the Rubira family brought gas to Mobile. They had this ballroom with these huge mirrors hanging from the ceiling in chains at each end of the room reflecting each other so you had infinity if you stood in the middle of the room. And these bronze statues of Italian artists: Michelangelo, da Vinci, Raphael. And it had these fabulous chandeliers with bronze lilies and birds and vines and bronze chains. There were two doors that went onto a back porch that had been all enclosed, with a little bathroom built in and a gas stove in the corner. One door I closed off from floor to ceiling with an old velvet theater curtain. That was the closet. I had a double mattress on the floor, and I built a theatrical four-poster bed made of florist ribbon left over from a ballet. I had a marionette theater at that end and a grand piano. I gave some good parties. I still have a program from one of them. There were no chairs, so I had sheets of red blotting paper on the floor and had this wonderful buffet as you sat on your red blot of paper.

A Proper Salon

One day on Conception Street as I was passing by, I saw these jolly souls taking cardboard boxes full of secondhand books into a store. I went in and discovered these darlings were starting a bookshop. It was Cameron Plummer, who was the son of a famous Episcopal minister here, Dr. James Plummer, from Virginia. Cameron had had a disease, some sort of fever—I don’t think it was polio—as a child and had a long convalescence. He was one of the few persons I know who can claim to have read the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
from the first page of
A
to the last page of
Z
, straight through. The other was Adelaide. Adelaide and Eleanor were these two extraordinary sisters who went to the convent. Their original French ancestor was a nobleman, a Colonel Demouy, who came to Dauphin Island in 1690. They could have all the coats of arms hanging on the front door, clanking in the wind, if they wanted. But that’s not their idea of grand. Their idea of grand is you do not go outside of the house unless your hair is kept and you are properly dressed. Their grandfather and their great-uncle, the Rapier brothers, owned the
Register
and the
Times-Picayune.
They were very distinguished publishers in their day. Very advanced in their ideas and very insistent on good writing. Both girls had been raised as book-ies.

Anyway, Cameron Plummer and Adelaide Marston got together and just said, Well, Mobile hasn’t had a bookshop in a long time. I think in the twenties there were maybe some bookshops, but during the Depression there was only the book department in Hammell’s Dry Goods Company down on Royal Street. All it had was a book section which sold textbooks for the schools. Adelaide and Cameron were able to get this house, the old Rapier house which belonged to Adelaide’s relatives, on Conception Street. It’s a beautiful double house with a carriage drive through the middle, which is a law firm now. And Adelaide had filled it with Victorian furniture from the family attic. They called it the Haunted Book Shop, because both Adelaide and Cameron loved a book that came out in 1919 or 1920 by Christopher Morley, a forgotten American writer. He wrote two novels about a bookseller. The man called his shop the Haunted Book Shop. He said it’s haunted by the ghosts of all great literature.

Everything worked for the bookshop to be a great success. Paperbacks had just begun again when the New American Library was founded in 1938 and published five paperback books. It was a revolution, because people who had heard of Shakespeare thought for twenty-five cents they might take a chance on it. Then the war was starting, and all these people who came to town to work for the shipyards—none of them knew anything about the jobs they were doing, so there was a tremendous market for technical books. At the same time, in wartime, people always read better books. Thornton Wilder once said in conversation that in peacetime people want a more comfortable life. In wartime people want a better life. That’s what happened. People kept coming back to the shop.

It was a proper salon. Adelaide had coffee going an hour before it opened and two hours after it closed. And hidden behind books were all the bottles that Cameron got off various ships. People would leave their children in Adelaide’s care. Park their cars in front. There was one man who came to town every Saturday, would tether his horse to the front ironwork. It was a message center. You know, ladies in their white gloves and hats would be there and say, “Oh, Adelaide, if Enola May comes by, tell her I’m going to be late, but I’ll meet her here at twelve-thirty.” There was a bulletin board with thumbtacked messages. If you wanted to start a rumor, you could say something in the Haunted Book Shop, and it would have reached Mt. Vernon, Alabama, by noon.

And everybody was there. There was a wonderful lady, a great scholar who was doing the French and Spanish papers at Spring Hill College. She would come in the Haunted Book Shop on her cane and she’d sit down and say, “Oh, I really feel faint.” And Cameron would say, “Oh, I’ve got just the thing for you.” And he’d whisk some Spanish cognac to her immediately. He finally went to keeping it behind the technical books. And she always sank in this little Victorian chair, and he would just say, “Oh, I know just the thing for you.”

There were the most extraordinary characters. At the end of the day, those who were left over, like Adelaide and Cameron and the bookkeeper and sometimes myself, would go through the characters of the day. Laughing at them, what they said, what books they wanted. It was like, I imagine, Shakespeare & Company in Paris in the twenties. What the Gotham Book Mart in New York was when that crazy lady was running it. There were writers and painters and the whole human traffic. They would come for wedding presents. She’d want a cookbook or household hints. Or a King James version for the new household. And stay just to listen to conversations going on in there. I was in there because there were so many books I wanted.

I met Harper Lee there, because Truman sent her to every bookshop in the South when his first book,
Other Voices, Other Rooms,
came out. So she came to the Haunted Book Shop and told us she was the original of the little girl in the book. Well, apparently she is. I’ve never seen her since. I’ve talked to her on the phone. She’s got this gin-and-Chesterfield voice now. She was a small-town Southern girl when I first met her, and now she’s Miss Gin. She’s lived too long in New York, and that’s why she’s never written another book.

Finally, of course, I started working odd hours at the Haunted Book Shop. I lived there. When I wasn’t at work, I was living there. I mean, I just went through every shelf. It was full of furniture, and people sat on little low chairs, lower than the usual Victorian chairs. And there were ashtrays everywhere, and along about four-thirty sherry came out. The eight-to-five world had not yet taken over. It is what I suppose in some moment we will call civilization.

Part Two

The Arctic Circle

Edgar Allan Poe and “The Gold-Bug”

When I was nineteen I was drafted and went off to basic training at Fort McPherson, Georgia. When I got to Georgia, they immediately put me to work. They had all these second lieutenants from New England who were supposed to be doing the registration. Of course, they didn’t know how to deal with those backwoods boys. They would ask direct questions, like “What is your name?” “Where are you from?” and the backwoods boys wouldn’t answer those direct questions. So they got Private Walter, and they gave me an office. These boys would come in, and I’d say, “Well, howdy. I’m from Mobile. Where are you from?”

“Possum Hollow.”

“Whoa, you-all got good hunting there. I been near Possum Hollow. I was at a place up the road called Richton. I was a CCC boy.”

“You were a CCC boy?”

“I was a CCC boy at Richton.”

“My cousin went to Richton. He was a CCC boy.”

And then I could say, “Now what’s your name?” So I’d get the last name and I’d say, “Now I knew a J. T. Wideman up at Richton. That any kin to you?”

“I’m Billy Bob.”

“What about your daddy? His name the same as yours?”

“No, Daddy’s named John Ed.”

“What was your mama’s name before she married Mr. John Ed?”

“Well, she was a Muskrat.”

Then they needed what church they go to, so I said, “Oh, Possum Hollow. They got that pretty little white church, got all the privet bushes around.”

“Oh no, no, I went to the Methodist on the other side of the tracks.”

So I could finally build their entrance form, from a conversation, you see, not from direct questions. But all those second lieutenants from New England were having nervous breakdowns because these boys would just sit there. They wouldn’t talk to those Yankee boys.