Milking the Moon (3 page)

A case in point would be Eugene’s oft-told tale about the time he had dinner in Paris with William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter. At the end of a spectacular meal at one of the finest Parisian restaurants, Eugene says, Faulkner leaned back in his chair and observed wistfully, “Back home, the first butter beans will be coming in.” In the most classic version of the tale, Katherine Anne Porter replies with the same wistfulness, “Blackberries.” The title of a recent Southern cookbook,
Butter Beans to Blackberries
, was inspired by this story of Eugene’s. I have heard that well-known version, but the version Eugene recounted to me on tape is slightly different. After Katherine Anne Porter says “Butter beans,” Faulkner says, “The baby speckled ones.” “Blackberries” had been put into a shoebox, and “the baby speckled ones” had been taken out.

Although I know of no feasible way to verify this story, I don’t doubt that Eugene attended such a dinner with William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter. I have no trouble believing that they had an exchange afterward which inspired the dialogue Eugene has attributed to them in his retelling. But clearly Eugene has been doctoring that dialogue for some time. The anecdote has a basis in fact, but Eugene is in the details. I think this is the case for many, if not all, of Eugene’s stories.

In another interview, when I was pressing Eugene to supply a specific name or date in one of his stories, he finally replied in exasperation, “Oh, darling, I can’t remember. That’s a research detail for a novelist. I’m a ballad singer.” This was the second time he had referred to himself as a ballad singer, and the analogy is as instructive as it is appropriate. Eugene’s narrative is often lacking in specific names, dates, and other dry facts not particularly relevant to the heart of a given story. So be it, I say. When Eugene later recalled such information, or corrected an error or inconsistency, I have changed the text accordingly. Otherwise I have let the lapse of memory, the contradiction, or the error stand. As I see it, my role was to let Eugene be Eugene in print as he was in person and thus capture his character as I knew it and his voice as I heard it. In putting together the final manuscript, I have strenuously avoided any editorial meddling which would violate the integrity of either that character or his voice. Inevitably, I have not been able to include every story Eugene told me or cover every aspect of his busy life. This book is representative of those stories and that life, but it is by no means comprehensive.

There is a Cast of Characters at the back of the book which provides biographical information about many of the people Eugene mentions. Of course, some of them have not yet made it into the reference books. Others are too far-flung to be tracked down by even the most diligent researcher. I hope the reader will approach it with the spirit in which it is offered: as a helpful, though not exhaustive, appendix to the text.

*

The last time I saw Eugene Walter alive was on March 29, 1998, when he lay in a coma in the hospital a few hours before he died. He could not know that I had just driven over from New Orleans, where I now live, to pay my final respects and say farewell. I’m sure he wanted it that way. Farewells and final respects were not really in his line. To the last, Eugene Walter was a man of comedy, not tragedy, or even serious drama. Nothing illustrates this point better than my encounter with him just two months earlier, the last time I saw him truly alive.

My husband and I were to pick him up at seven o’clock on a Saturday night in late January for a dinner party at a friend’s house. We rang the doorbell right on time. I knew immediately that something was wrong. The mail, which was one of the loves of Eugene’s life, was still in the mailbox outside the door. Nor did I hear the faint sounds of the classical music that Eugene kept on for the cats whenever he left the house. The familiar sounds of his feet shuffling to the front door also failed to materialize. There were no sounds of any kind. The house was all silence, stillness, and darkness. There was no Eugene.

We rang the doorbell repeatedly, to no avail. We tried the front door and the back door without success. We went around the side of the house and hollered for Eugene through the windows. No answer.

Finally we got back in the car and drove down the block to the pay phone at the Circle K. There was no answer at Eugene’s house. Then we called our host to see if Eugene had perhaps contacted him or canceled for the evening. But no, our host replied that he had spoken with Eugene at noon, and Eugene was most enthusiastic about attending the dinner party that evening. In desperation we dialed Eugene’s number again. This time we got a busy signal. We hopped in the car and raced back to his house.

But the same thing happened all over again. No answer when we rang the doorbell. No answer when we shouted through the windows. We took our second trip back to the pay phone at the Circle K. And this time Eugene picked up the phone.

“Eugene, are you okay?”

“Darling,” he said, “I’m perfectly fine. I just can’t get up off the bathroom floor.”

“You can’t get up off the bathroom floor?”

“I’m flat on my back on the bathroom floor.”

“What in the world has happened?”

“I just stumbled and lost my balance and fell.”

“Are you hurt?”

“Darling, I could dance a jig if I could just get up, but I can’t get up. I’ve been trying all afternoon.”

“All afternoon?!”

“Yes, darling. Luckily there’s a phone in the hall right outside the bathroom, and I’ve been trying for hours to get hold of the cord. Finally I managed to grab it and pull it over to me.”

“You know, Eugene, the line was busy when I called you earlier.”

“Oh,” he said, “that was Nell.”

“Well, is she on her way over? Does she have a key to your house? Did you tell her what happened? “

“No, darling. Of course not.”

“But Eugene—why not?”

“Because, darling, it was none of her business.”

Nell was one of his best friends—someone he’d known for over fifty years.

We had no choice but to call 911, and a few moments later firemen broke into Eugene’s house and retrieved him from the bathroom floor.

“Mr. Walter,” one said, “are you on any medications, sir?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Let’s see. Ah—honey, peanut butter, British orange marmalade, and Jim Beam.”

“May we see your driver’s license, Mr. Walter?”

“I don’t have a license. I don’t drive a car, I don’t wear blue jeans, and I don’t go to football games.”

It was during that episode at his house that I finally acknowledged something I’d been denying and suppressing for months: Eugene Walter was dying. Yet I was laughing.

With almost anyone else, what had just happened would have created a sad, somber, serious scene. With Eugene, however, it was comic. It was as if the tragic could not even gain a toehold in the presence of Eugene Walter. There was no room for it, no oxygen for it. It was not just that Eugene had been able to “maintain a sense of humor” after spending what we later figured was at least six hours on the bathroom floor. It was something more than that. The sheer force of his personality had turned a potentially tragic scenario into a comedy.

With his aching back and his evident discomfiture, he was not trying to be funny, any more than I was being callous by laughing. He was just being Eugene, and I was just doing what I always found myself doing whenever I was with him—I was laughing. Even in the face of death.

Afterward I came to understand and respect Eugene’s comic genius more than I ever had before. Eugene saw life through the lens of his own antic wit. He loved to quote Aristophanes’ claim that “God is a comic poet.” Paradoxically, his whimsical response to life was so powerful that he forced others to see the humor in any given situation, including death. This vision was not one that denied the serious or the tragic, or merely anesthetized us to that part of life. Rather, his was a spirit that could find and affirm the joy of life in the midst of the terrible, the horrible, the traumatic, and the catastrophic. To know Eugene was to know that joy. He helped to show us the joy and fun of living when we might have seen nothing but a grim reality. Not only that, but he could transform a grim reality, like a bad spill onto the bathroom floor, or a dull chore, like going to the grocery store, into an occasion for hilarity.

Eugene stands as an important and rare counterpart to the many people, especially in America, who are so caught up in some serious purpose that they have no ability to enjoy the tiny details of daily life. Indeed, anything that does not pertain to that serious purpose or pursuit is only an irritant for such people. For them, the world is just an interference, a place of small daily torments. Too late, they often learn that achieving that goal or dream was not the key to happiness they thought it would be, and they’ve missed out on life along the way.

Those without such a driven or “serious” approach to life are the ones for whom, like Eugene, the world opens up in all its infinite beauty and enchantment. A trip to the grocery store could give him no end of pleasure, as he cruised the aisles, humming happily to himself, pushing his basket, inspecting the shelves, and then, inevitably, going into a paroxysm of delight as he discovered some new item, like, say, lingonberry jam.

Not only would he be transported, but in turn, his presence somehow transfigured the store from a modern-day wasteland of fluorescent lights and Muzak into a magical universe of surprises and possibilities. And from him I learned a lesson that few teach us in a society so consumed with success: It is not necessarily the most important or significant things that can give us the most intense happiness in our daily lives. It’s the stray cat, the purple wild-flower, the lingonberry jam.

When Eugene died that Sunday night a few hours after I left the hospital, I was at first distraught that I had not been able to say my final farewells. Now I’m glad that my final encounter with him was on that night in January, when he dusted himself off and said, “Of course I’m still going to the party, darling. I wouldn’t
dream
of missing it.”

*

When Eugene Walter died, one of the few remaining vestiges of a bygone Southern culture died also. As Eugene himself once remarked, “They don’t make them like they used to,” even in the South. The Southern psyche and Southern voice that Eugene exemplified have virtually disappeared along with the South itself. I am proud to have been a part of putting together a book which attempts to preserve Eugene Walter for posterity. I will be the first to say that the experience of reading his stories and encountering his personality in print pales tremendously in comparison with the experience of actually being in Eugene’s company and watching him perform his stories with gestures and pantomime and facial expressions and eye movement and accents and mimicked dialogue. But I think those who knew and loved Eugene will find that this book comes as close as anything possibly could to capturing our dear old friend between two covers. And I know that the many others who never knew Eugene Walter will find in this book great cause to wish they had.

Katherine Clark

New Orleans
,
Louisiana

Part One

Mobile

Monkey Was I Born

You may think you don’t know me, but you have probably seen me on late-night television playing either an outlaw or a hanging judge. During those twenty-three years I lived in Rome, I must have been in over a hundred of those crazy Italian films. I’ve been a crooked cardinal, a lecherous priest, and a female impersonator, just to name a few. I was Velvet Fingers in Lina Wertmüller’s
Ballad of Belle Starr.
If you’ve ever seen Fellini’s
8½
I’m the tacky American journalist who keeps pestering Marcello Mastroianni with obnoxious questions. And if you haven’t seen
8½
,
you need to: it’s one of the great films of this century.

But to begin at the beginning.

I was born, at least this time around, in little ole Mobile, Alabama, in my grandmother’s house on the corner of Conti and Bayou Streets. Downtown Mobile. 1921. The first thing I remember is a big gray face staring down at me. I learned later from my nurse, Rebecca, that it was one of my grandmother’s twenty-three cats. When someone suggested to my grandmother that it might not be in the best interests of the newborn baby to have a cat in its cradle, my grandmother said, “Nonsense.” The cat is much more likely to catch something from the baby, she said. So perhaps that is why I belong much more to the world of cats than I do to the human race.

And like most poets, I was born with my thumb attached to my nose in that ancient gesture of disrespect toward all authorities, establishments, institutions, and shitfaces. It has taken long and arduous operations to disattach it. In certain weather, and in certain circumstances, it jerks back to its original position.

The moment I was born, my sun, my moon, and my ascendant planet were all in the same sign of Sagittarius. The effect is that I am triple everything. Triple Sagittarius. Sagittarians are basically happy, don’t like to settle down, like to travel, are of an inquiring mind, basically generous, can be real mean and snotty if crossed, have lifelong feuds—the good Mobile stuff. We are the ones who gallop ahead two hundred miles and then stop and say, “What country is this?” If we could organize, we could have taken over the world way back, but we are interested in so many things that when we head for California, we end up in Florida. You know. Our emblem is the centaur: half animal, half man. And shooting that arrow at the moon. Centaurs have all four feet on the ground, but that arrow is whizzing off to a distant planet.