Milking the Moon (4 page)

I’m supposed to, by ancient tradition, get along with all Geminis because that’s the opposite sign. I get along perfectly well with Aquarius. They don’t understand us, and we don’t understand them, but we get along. So many of my lady friends have been Aquarius. Leontyne Price, Muriel Spark, Ginny Becker are all Aquarius. If I don’t show too much exuberance, I get along very well with Capricorns. Fellini is a Capricorn. All of the Italian film directors except Zeffirelli are Capricorns. But there are no fish signs anywhere in my life. Sagittarians do not get along with Pisces.

This is all part of an ancient body of knowledge that we have simply dumped, because the early Christians were opposed to it. But those cave age darlings were onto something. They knew that if that dead stone the moon can affect us the way
it
does, then those big things like Jupiter
have
to affect us. The movement of the planets, the influence of the planets on weather, on crops, on childbirth, animal husbandry, on everything—it was practical knowledge. Don’t underestimate those cave age people. We like to think they were just sitting around grunting and throwing dinosaur bones over their shoulders, but they had the rouge pot, the mascara pot, and the pet cat. They had everything. They knew what they were up to.

It’s not that I believe that thing in the daily paper that says you’re going to get a letter from Aunt Minny tomorrow. That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m saying is that once upon a time, astrology and astronomy used to be one subject. As alchemy and chemistry were. They were part of one core of knowledge and quest. In the precise imparting of known facts, there was always that open window toward the unknown, the uncharted, the unstatistified. Logic was not God, and statistic was not God. There was always a sense of quest. And that first horoscope done by the old lady in Mobile when I was a child proved exactly true. I quivered when I came back from Rome after all those years and found it in a box in Aimee King’s attic, along with the first marionettes I ever made. What she had predicted was, “You will never be rich, but you will travel widely and everything you really want you will have.” I read it again after all those years and just quivered. Triple Sagittarius.

And anyone who knows me knows I’m more monkey than man. (Actually I’m a rare cross between cat and monkey.) Monkeys can carry on two or three conversations at once. And while looking over their shoulder they are perfectly aware of what is happening in front of them. It’s the awareness, the total awareness of everything and the sense of mystery and creative mischief. Monkeys realize that many people die of boredom. More people die of boredom than die of diseases, since activity is the human norm. So many people get bogged down in marriage, business, church, property. So monkeys like to create mischief. That is to say, they eventually smash a few windows. People who stand upright in the usual way approach life in the usual way. But I’m more likely to be found upside down, swinging from the chandelier. And that’s why I have—shall we say—a different perspective. Monkey was I born, monkey am I, monkey evermore to be.

But after all, if, as a child, you saw, every Mardi Gras, the figure of Folly chasing Death around the broken column of Life, beating him on the back with a Fool’s Scepter from which dangled two gilded pig bladders; or the figure of Columbus dancing drunkenly on top of a huge revolving globe of the world; or Revelry dancing on an enormous upturned wineglass—wouldn’t you see the world in different terms, too?

South of the Salt Line

The South of every country is different, and the south of every South is even more so. I come from that stretch of Gulf Coast South which is another kingdom. Mobile is a Separate Kingdom. We are not North America; we are North Haiti. Because we are so different from the rest of the United States. The spirit is closer to the Caribe than it is even to Montgomery. I mean, with so many black people, banana trees, Carnival, corrupt politics, and all the little cottages in every color of the rainbow—pinks and corals and purple and turquoise—like Southern belles in ball gowns. It’s the Caribe. It’s another climate.

Someone driving southward will note a change about fifty miles before reaching the coast: a change in vegetation, a whiff of something in the air. It’s called “the salt line,” that invisible frontier between the Black Belt and the coastal plains. Coming south, at a given moment, you suddenly finish with hills and you’re on flat, level ground, and then you will begin to see palmettos and you begin to see certain large-leafed swamp things, and if the wind is right, you smell the salt air from the Gulf. You smell the salt. Then you know you’re south of the salt line.

And of course my dear friend, the writer Elizabeth Spencer, wrote a novel called
The Salt Line.
I met her in Rome. She had a fellowship at the American Academy, and she was writing that book about Rome they made into a film.
The Light in the Piazza,
or whatever it’s called. But she also wrote
The Salt Line,
where she revived that nineteenth-century phrase. It’s the idea that attitudes change, life is different, when you cross over the salt line. She is from a small town in Mississippi, and she is Something Else Again. She is not the usual Southern belle. She is not the amusing, intellectual Southern maiden lady. She is not the domestic Southern lady. She is not the socially conscious Southern lady. She is a little law unto herself. For many years she lived in Canada, and I think she got Canadized a little bit. Miss Elizabeth. She was very jolly when I knew her in Rome. We had many laughing evenings together.

But that’s an ancient Gulf Coast concept, the salt line. It’s probably Indian. Because you know the Indians used to come down to get salt. They dug salt from somewhere around this part of the world because there was a salt deposit here. And I guess when they did their little expeditions from up there to come get salt, they could smell the Gulf and knew they were crossing the salt line. And the sailors on the riverboats, you see, they would know they were getting close to the coast because they could smell it.

It’s a genuine frontier. It might be the frontier between a somewhat Anglo-Saxon South and a world which is a mélange of French, Spanish, English, and Confederate, with a thoroughbass of African and Indian. Or an invisible defining line between the Sunday South and the Saturday-night South. It means Mardi Gras and parties on this side, and it means Sunday school on the other. On that side of the line you have the plantations and the slaves and the cotton and all that. It’s the landed gentry with a rather British country house style. This group goes to call on that group. And that group goes to call on this group. They ride horses or carriages or whatever twenty miles for dinner. All that English country life—Southern country life ain’t so different. But when you get to the coast, you see, you’ve got pirates and drama and Carnival and fishing fleets and smuggling and so many different skies and thunderstorms, like this constantly changing pageant in the background. It’s another country. And that’s where I come from.

*

I feel like I’ve overlapped several civilizations and several centuries. When I was a small child, there were still Confederate veterans marching down Government Street on Memorial Day—men who’d been teenage boys in the War Between the States. There was one old gentleman my grandmother would take me to visit, who had a chamber pot with a picture of U. S. Grant in the bottom. And my first history lesson with Miss Maude Simpson, whose daddy was killed at Second Bull Run: Columbus discovered America, George Washington chopped down a cherry tree, and then this War Between the States broke out.

But the Mobile I grew up in during the 1920s was still a French port city. Mobile was French, Spanish, and English, but the French were strong. You would never know it now except for the street names and the fact that the old downtown is laid out on a grid. It is not laid down according to where the bayou flowed. It is Bienville Square, things going east and west, things going north and south—it’s a French layout. When I was a child there were still more French names. A lot of them are still around, but somehow there is no feeling of it being a French city. First World War, Second World War, all those peasants in the fields came to work in the shipyards and built Baptist churches on every corner. But back then Mobile was quite a place. The twenties were roaring here like they were everywhere. There were rumrunners on the Bay and moonshiners in the woods. And seventeen bordellos on State Street and St. Anthony Street.

And how I wish I could really have known Mobile, not just as a child, in the days of those great restaurants—and they were great: the wine lists went on forever—and all those bars, those theaters going full blast,
and
the circuses,
and
the tent shows,
and
the magicians,
and
the fortune-tellers. I think I’d like that.

My cousins the Schimpfs had a restaurant on Dauphin Street. There were 280-something dishes on the menu, and they were all cooked to order. They had the first refrigerator anywhere on the Gulf Coast. There was always a whole side of venison in there, thousands of hams, guinea hens. And they had a wonderful wine list. They got cases off of ships from here and ships from there because Mobile was an old-fashioned port. And the customs inspector—if you gave him a bottle of wine, he would look upriver when you came in with cases of wine.

And of course there were the whorehouses. Nobody said “whorehouse”; they said “Miss Edna’s place” or “Miss Minnie’s place.” Now most ladies—three or four children, two dogs, one servant, household to clean, laundry—they were so glad if the boys went and got it off before they came home at night. Boys have to get their rocks off every eight to twenty-four hours. It’s not my idea—Mother Nature made them that way. And the Gulf Coast understood that in a way the Baptist country does not. The minute a woman realizes the way Mother Nature has made all healthy male creatures, then the expectations of romance, courtship, marriage, shared real estate, or vacations in the mountains take on a more relaxed air. But the bordellos were not just for copulation. It was where the boys went to shoot dice and play cards. And do the political gossip of Mobile. Because the gentlemen couldn’t shoot dice at home with mothers or wives. Even some card games were forbidden. So they were clubs where you went to play cards or shoot craps or talk politics or just drink moonshine.

The bordellos were really one of the greatest deterrents to crime because if those sailors had been on those boats a month, they were ready to copulate. And instead of finding a town with no bordellos, nothing but bars where they would get drunk and fight and kill each other or kill whoever was passing, in Mobile they could have a good fuck and then drink and be happy. Then there are all these mad country boys dying for a blow job. And their born-again Baptist wives wouldn’t give them one. So the bordellos kept everything in balance. Otherwise you’d have all these mean rednecks running around killing each other.

And some of them just wanted female company. The fat ladies, the ample ladies who were mistresses, were strange combinations of mother superior, mother, grandmother, doctor, nurse, female notary. They were all kinds of functions, those madams. They knew everybody’s little perversions. They might know that the president of the bank liked to have two young teenage girls to bite his buttocks simultaneously. And they would always find the proper little girls. Because the president of the bank would call and he would say something like “Two for tea.” It was a French city. It was Bordeaux. It was Marseilles. It was a French city.

And how I wish I could have played bridge in one of those whorehouses and just talked to those country girls. These country girls who were from families with eighteen boys and fourteen girls and just wanted to get some money together to buy themselves a piece of property in their county. And having seen dogs, cats, cows, horses, pheasants, and guinea hens copulating, there was no news to them about copulation. It was just something boys wanted to do. So they would come to town and work for three or four years in a bordello and save every penny. Go home and buy themselves a pocket handkerchief, find ’em a guy and marry, and raise eight children. Pillars of the church. Modest downcast eyes. They never told all they knew.

Lord, Lord: the facts of life.

King of Cats and Onions

My grandfather Walter, from whom I get my name, came to America as a young man, and he came to Mobile because Mobile was this little cosmopolitan port with an enormous Bavarian colony. Just as Mobile had interesting French and interesting Spanish and highly interesting Jewish, it also had an educated Bavarian population. My grandfather Walter came from this town in Bavaria where his family had had property since the Middle Ages because they were scribes. They were given land for helping somebody in some crusade because they could read and write and the Bavarian prince couldn’t read and write. So that’s how they got land. Walter means noble but without a title, means you’ve got a certain amount of real estate. But he was, my grandfather, maybe the youngest child, the youngest son, so everybody else had gotten the land, naturally, and he had to get up and go, and so he came to America, to this Bavarian city that had for forty years a German-language daily newspaper of great excellence.

My grandmother was French-Swiss, of a family that had been asked to leave Austria in the eighteenth century because they were too liberal in their views, so they went to Switzerland. So my grandmother, who was this amusing tiny lady with clanking amethyst beads, spent her childhood in Switzerland. And then my mother’s father was a Norwegian ship captain. A family that had been in mercantile shipping for centuries. They all had this “get up and go” thing, and one of the ports that my grandfather came to was Pensacola, Florida, which had been a Spanish and English big-deal port. The Norwegian ship captain fell in love with that city and met this Miss Layfield—it’s a French name that got anglicized. They married and had five children.