The Tartans of Mississippi

They say that associations make a man.  I don't know if that's just, but it certainly was true growing up in Mississippi in the seventies and eighties.

In most places, political party would be an essential association, but it didn't matter much in Mississippi.  Everybody but Wirt Yerger and Billy Mounger were Democrats, and Yerger and Mounger were generally considered mad priests screaming on the temple steps about this new Republican God.   A political trick got Thad Cochran elected, but nobody thought this Republican business would catch on--until Ronald Reagan.  

Mississippians loved movies with cowboys and war heroes, and Reagan made many of them.  Reagan told America its biggest problem was welfare moms, and he took the guns away from the Black Panthers in California.  Yes, Regan was for gun control--under certain circumstances.  These messages resonated in Mississippi.  The glacial ice around the Republican party began to melt.   Yes, they were the people who burned Jackson to the ground.  Yes, they were the people who imposed reconstruction on us for sixty years.  Yes, they were the ones sending revenue officers to raid the parties at Crystal Lake.  All of that is true, but ya know, he sure did show them Black Panthers what, didn't he?

We were a democratic family.  Part of it was just business.  The Democrats were in power all over our sales territory, and we made most of our money selling to public institutions.  It was also a moral decision.  Daddy felt, and I felt, that Mississippi is nearly entirely made up of poor people.  This middle-class bubble we lived in wasn't the real Mississippi.  The real Mississippi could barely pay their rent.  They had poor health because, even if they worked, they had no insurance, and they had no education because that cost money, and nobody had any.   Democrats were more interested in and more generous to poor people.  Democrats also had a better farm bill than the Republicans.  Reagan promised to "restore profitability" to Mississippi farmers by removing government intrusion.  Boy, was he wrong.  

Even though things weren't really working out between Mississippi and Ronald Reagan, this new Republicanism was quietly growing like a thief in the night.  Young Republicans could be identified by their highly starched Oxford cloth shirts, and their numbers were growing.  

From 1963 until the day Daddy died, every successful candidate for Governor of Mississippi had passed through my mother's doors to introduce the candidate to the new Capitol Street Gang.  (Every one, except Cliff Finch.)  I knew when Johnny Gore showed up in the afternoon with all of his bartending stuff, we were in for one of "those" parties.

William Winter and Herman Hines had alerted Daddy to this young fella named Ray Mabus.  He was one of the "boys of spring" who were either hated or celebrated in Mississippi.  He had a firm handshake and a burning intensity in his eyes.  The silent promise was that he would finish what Winter had started.

The party at the Holiday Inn on Millsaps campus, the one owned by Mike Sturdivant (who also had political aspirations), was not my first political victory party, but it was the first where I was old enough to be expected to wear a tie, so I did.  Ray's face was beet red, and sweat rolled freely from under his perfect hair.  He grabbed my hand and my shoulder, like a German butcher sizing up a fresh ham.  This was our new governor.  

Mabus lived up to his unspoken promise and continued the work Bill Winter started.  He was an education-forward governor, and he was winning.  Mississippi adopted new history textbooks on schedule but had no money to buy them.  Mabus made sure Mississippi school children had history and science textbooks written since we landed on the moon. 

Politically, we were successful, and we were happy, but this Reagan thing was growing.   Still, it had to be an anomaly.  One day, Daddy and Rowan and my brother and Doby Bartling used our company tickets to attend an Ole Miss game at Veterans Memorial Stadium in Jackson.  The announcer said, "Please stand while the Rebel Band plays our National Anthem."  Wich everybody did.  "Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to our distinguished guest, the Governor of Mississippi, Ray Mabus!"  I could see Ray and his Wife standing in their box seat and waving, but then a sound came from the Ole Miss student section.  They were Booing the Governor of Mississippi, A Democratic Governor of Mississippi,  A Democratic Governor of the State of Mississippi who had graduated Suma Comes Loudly from the University of Mississippi--and they were booing him.  I looked at Daddy and said, "Are we in trouble?"

So, that was the day the Democratic Empire in the state of Mississippi fell.  The dragons had arrived, and soon we'd have our first Republican governor.  Party became an important association by which you judged a man.  For a while, it was, at least.  Lately, we basically flipped the situation that existed; all the white people are n the Republican party now, and all the not white people are in the Democratic.  

Politics were one way to judge a man; religion was another.  Wherever you went to church in Jackson, nearly everyone aligned themselves with five major churches.  Three of them were on corners of the new Capitol Building.  Galloway, First Baptist, and St. Peters.  Beyond that was Central Presbyterian which was replaced in power by First Presbyterian and Beth Israel out in North Jackson.   The other churches followed what these five did.  One thing I'm learning in my recent studies is that St Luke's had all the same problems that Galloway had, just on a smaller scale.   Don't let anybody tell you that Jews and Catholics had no power in Mississippi.  Look at the names of the people who served on the boards of the banks.  Jews from Eastern Europe and Catholics from Ireland were a force in our economic life.  Look at the names of the stores.  Names like Stein and Maloney.

That brings up the next most important way to judge a man.  Banks.  There were two.  You had to pick one.  You HAD to pick one.  Deposit Guarantee had more assets.  First National was more conservative—First National funded financials and retail.  Deposit Guarantee funded an awful lot of real estate and light manufacturing.   One day Jeanne Luckett considered the entrails of a sacred goose and renamed First National Trustmark National Bank, followed by one of the most extensive marketing campaigns in Mississippi history.   Gone were the plastic frugal banks and all the trappings of the sixties.  This was a new bank for a new decade.  Mainly it was done because there were so many "First National" banks all over the world.  It worked.  Shortly after that, she reworked our image as well, and we got rid of those awful orange block letters and got a nifty stylized "M" to represent us.

What college you went to wasn't nearly as important as what college you supported in football and baseball.  Daddy played football for two years at Millsaps and then two at Ole Miss.  He enjoyed Ole Miss Football, but it was mainly a way for him to spend time with us kids.  One of the problems with having a dad like mine was that it sometimes got really hard to spend any time with him.  The only way to do it was to figure out how to fit myself into his schedule.  We had tickets to every game at Veterans Memorial Stadium because we had installed the bleachers and were morally obligated to buy season tickets.  Ben Puckett was one of his best friends.  As much as Daddy was lukewarm about Ole Miss, Ben was very warm about Mississippi State.  

Rowan went to Mississippi State too, but in a culture that was obsessed with the major public university football teams, Rowan Taylor was solidly in a secretive, invasive cult called Millsaps.   I don't even know what lured Rowan into the Major's influence.  Toward the end of his life, it was the woman he loved, but I never knew about how it started.  He was deeply devoted to Eudora Welty.  Maybe that was it.

Daddy enjoyed football at Ole Miss, but he loved football at Millsaps.  You could tell because he'd skip an Ole Miss game if none of us went with him, but he'd go to Millsaps games alone, in the cold and the rain.  He would never really be alone, though.  If they were in Mississippi and in good health, Daddy would meet Rowan, George Harmon, and Jack Woodward at the same spot for every game.  There's a balcony/deck thing there now.  Then it was just grass.  

"Get me some peanuts, buddy.  Get one for Rowan.  Here's five bucks; get five."  I figured out if I was gonna get to know my Daddy, I had to meet him on his own turf.  

So, of the houses and tartans of Mississippi, I align myself this way:  Trustmark, Democrat (mainly because the Republicans are currently fuckin' nuts), Galloway, Ole Miss--but in the cult of Millsaps.  

Our culture doesn't really go by these rules anymore.  For one thing, When Warren and Elsie Hood retired, they sold off their Deposit Guarantee shares, so now they're owned by an out-of-state entity.  That's a whole other story.  I'm old-fashioned, though.  I like to pretend it's 1982, and I'm eighteen, and Jackson is growing like a weed...

Not really.  I'm pretty realistic about the world as it is.  I still like to think about the way it was.  That happens when you get old.  "You Damn Millennials are gonna run everything!!"  Actually, that's not true.  I kind of like the Millennials.  They have great potential.  

Creative Constipation

 For weeks, I was suffering from chronic creative constipation.  I tried talking to feist-dog, but he was mostly asleep and not at all interested in me.  If I can't make things, eventually, I'll die of starvation.  I think that's part of how I ended up flat on my back in the hospital.  I had given up on making things for too long.  If creation is my life force, then I was suffering from severe ataxia.

It took me fifty-eight years to become what I was born to be.  I don't blame anyone except maybe myself.  My parents had no more idea of what to do with me than if someone had given them a giraffe.  I stole that line from the movie Gods and Monsters.  You should see it.

After what seemed like an eternity of constipation, this weekend, I had a breakthrough and have been experiencing an abundant eruption of griffonage ever since.  A friend of mine read my piece about Lavender Graduation and said how much she enjoyed it, but it was "SO LONG."  

I told Sam that part of that was me figuring out how I'm going to write about certain things and certain people in my book.  My purpose isn't to expose anyone or excise any personal daemons (any more than I can help it). What I'm trying to create isn't journalism.  It's more like writing down a melody that's been haunting me for decades.  I'd like to say something about humanity, not individual people.

If I ever finish the goddamn thing, and if you ever read it, there will be times when you say, "Oh, I know him!" but you won't.  All the characters are composites of several people.  Almost all the events in my story are, or were, real; but I might move them around thinking it's more interesting if it happens to John rather than Peter like it did in real life, so there may be times when you say "oh, I remember that."  but, it'll be different from what you remember.  

Some of the people in the book aren't alive anymore, so I'm moving gingerly through the words because their memory is more important to me than any ten books, and they're not here for me to ask, "Is it ok to say this?"  Part of why I want to do this is because it's a love letter for people I can't speak to anymore.  That doesn't include fiest-dog.  

Without anything more logical, I'll attribute my late surge of creativity to Nicole Saad going to Greece.  Some of the plays I enjoyed working on the most were with Nicole.  For the most part, we love the same people and the same things.  That counts for a lot.   You don't get to share that with very many people in this world.  When it happens, hold them dear.

The myths of Greece, the plays, and the poems are as fundamental to my way of thinking as the Christian myths.  "Myth" doesn't mean "not true."  Myth means "A story of the Gods."  I have no problem mentioning Greek myths in the same sentence as Christian myths because the only commandment I have to deal with is "Thou shalt have no Gods before me." and I don't have a problem with that.  Zeus, as important as he is, won't ever supplant Yahweh in my mind or heart.

My love for Hellenistic culture I owe to several people.   The finer points and more intricate discussions I owe to Joseph Campbell's books in part, but a much, much larger part to Catherine and Richard Freis.  My dearest Martha Hammond gave me an illustrated Edith Hamilton book when I was in middle school, which helped a great deal.  Martha was one of the people who didn't give up on the idea that I could learn to read.  

My very first exposure to Greek Myth came on a Saturday night on the rug of my mom's house, with two boys around me and a baby sister in daddy's arms on the sofa.  Jason and the Argonauts came on television, and I was amazed.  Later in life, I would come to know the magician, Ray Harryhausen, who created the god Talos and the monster hydra and the army of the dead.  I've written a lot about my experiences with Ray Harryhausen and Ray Bradbury, and Forrest Ackerman; this is how it began.

Nicole travels the world with a cluster covey of ladies like a younger version of The Golden Girls, but also like Sex In The City in the Suburbs.  They spread a bunch of Mississippi all over unsuspecting people in foreign lands.  It amuses and pleases me to no end.  I'd do anything for Nicole Saad Bradshaw.  I'm absolutely certain she'll have cocktails on the moon one day, and I'll see it on Instagram.

It's five o'clock in the morning, and I can't sleep because I need to make words.  They make themselves, I just jot them down.  I used to do this knowing that nobody but feist-dog would ever see what I wrote.  Now that I'm letting everybody see my scribbles, it's kind of weird.  This has changed from the way I communicate with God to the way I communicate with my friends.  Ironically, when I communicated with only God, my language used many more blue words.  I'm trying to cut down because my Aunt says I can do better.  She's right, of course, but I still like to slip on in here and there for emphasis--goddamnit.

I hope, when I die, it will be during one of these periods where the words flow freely from me, like a bubbling well, rather than one of these periods when I don't anything to say to anybody, where God and Feist-dog have both abandoned me. 

In Mississippi, practicing law or medicine will make you somebody, but writing will make you immortal.  Go to Hal and Mal's some time and see how many writers are on the wall.  We're almost as big as Elvis.  Go to Oxford sometime, and you can feel the words moving through the air.  There are many things Mississippi cannot do, but this we can.  

Love! Vallor! Compassion!

 This is a play Lance, and I discussed not long before his heart attack.  He hadn't been to New York in several years, so he never got to see Nathan Lane eat the entire play, cast and all.  My point was that if he liked it, and he did like it, he should do it.  

It was difficult to talk to Lance about gay issues as a practical matter.  "It wouldn't be accepted."  "Some would consider it scandalous."  For a mid-century marvel like himself, Lance could sometimes act like a Victorian grandmother.  

When Lance was uncomfortable, he would set his jaw and look side to side rather than straight on.  He tapped his cane into the ground and twisted it like a wood awl.  "You know, John Taylor died of this,"  Lance said.  John Tyler is a made-up name.  I'm sorry.  He was a real person.  A person both Lance I knew.  A real person who never taught at Millsaps but had attended Millsaps and worked closely with Millsaps and died of aids.  Love! Vallor!  Compassion! is an aids play.  

When I looked it up a few moments ago, something like seven hundred thousand men have died of aids since I was a freshman at Millsaps.  That's not a lot when you consider all men in America.  It's a lot more when you're starting with a group that's already only ten percent of the population.  If you're in my generation, in the arts almost at any capacity, that's one, two, three, several people you knew or worked with.  Within a demographic group, it's a plague of biblical proportions.  There are treatments now.  Most people live through aids now.  They're talking about how some people are actually cured now.  There was a time, though, when in a certain demographic group, you knew you were going to have to say goodbye to some people you loved while they were very young, only you didn't know who.  

It's ironic that the disease that was literally killing gay men in America was also the catalyst that made them more visible than they have been since Victoria sent Oscar Wilde to jail for it.  Rock Hudson had aids.  Liberace had aids.  Elizabeth fucking Taylor spread out her hands and spoke of aids.  

"I can't cast it,"  Lance said

That may not have been a lie.  Every cast call he ever had, there were at least three times as many women auditioning as men.  Finding four men willing to play gay characters at Millsaps in the Nineties would have been difficult.  Finding four men willing to play gay characters who could also meet Lance's standards for acting was a genuine obstacle.

"What about Matt Henry as Buzz?"  I said.

"Matt would be very good.  He has that sort of energy.  But would he?"

"Matt would do anything you asked him to."  I said, with an emphasis on "anything YOU asked him to."

Before his heart attack, I often shared cigarettes with Lance.  "Anything but Menthol."  He would say.  After his heart attack, I said I couldn't share anymore.  "Of Course not,"  he said with an almost accusatory glare.  I still smoked.  He knew that.  He would never smoke again.  He knew that too.  On that level, we were no longer comrades, veterans of a war he was no longer a part of.

We smoked silently, communicating with eyes and hands and whisps of translucent white air and thoughts and ideas we dared never verbalize.  Lance knew I was straight.  Lance knew I loved him more than nearly anyone we knew.  Lance knew that I loved art more.  He also knew I was willing to push boundaries; he was not.

"I do like the play," he said.  "I could do it.  It would be marvelous.  I could do it.  I'm just not ready to do it."  Stalemate.  

Wendy comes in and steals a piece of candy.  Brent is behind her.  We have a production meeting.  That was the last time we ever discussed Love! Vallor! Compassion!  

Lance died with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof being the closest thing to a gay play he ever produced.  For a man who spent sixty years in the theater, gay or straight, that's unusual.  Part of that is the difference between his generation and mine.  A much bigger part of that is being born in Mississippi.  On issues like race, gender, sexuality, and religion, we torture ourselves at least as much as we torture each other in Mississippi.  Lance did plays on all these things with great passion and energy, all of these things except sexuality.  That was a line he would not cross, but if you ever saw his productions of Cat, he got right up next to it without going over.  

Tennessee Williams always included a beautiful young man in his plays, rippling with masculine power and pathos and almost always suffering.  A few times, a beautiful young man past his prime but still the heart of the play.  Williams fanatics, knowing how much of his work was autobiographical, spent many hours trying to connect one of Williams' men to some actual person living in the delta who might have inspired Williams.  I think characters like Brick and Stanley were a way for Williams to say something about himself.  About the life he would lead if he wasn't an introverted writer with a complicated family history.  Lance loved producing Wiliams's plays.  He did them all.  He told me once he preferred them to Shakespeare, but it wasn't an easy choice.

The last play I did with Lance was Dangerous Corner by JB Priestly.  Some of you were in it.  A heart attack, a broken leg, and shoulder had taken much of the fire out of Lance.  Normally he would do four, if not five, plays in a year.  That year he did two.  I told him I wanted to Stage Manage both.  I said it was because we didn't have a good stage manager in the company that year.  That was a lie.  I wanted to stage manage these last plays because I didn't know how much longer I had with Lance.  I didn't know how much longer the world would have of Lance.  If these were to be his last plays, I wanted them to be the kind of experience he loved.  

I wouldn't normally wait for the director to drive up and walk them to the theater when I stage manage, but I did then.  Fears for his health and fears for his life made Lance often feel defeated and afraid.  Not things I ever expected of him.  I've seen men die before.  It starts in the mind.  

"I can't do it today."  He said, sitting in his car seat, weeping.  

"Take your time, bud.  There's thirty minutes until call for the cast."

"I can't walk." He said, "I can't walk from her to the theater."

"We can stop and rest on the stoop halfway.  I sit on the stoop all the time."  I said.

"I hate this."  Lance said.

"I do too."  I said, and we went to rehearsal.  

For Lance, rage against the dying of the light was something he did with fierce discretion and a fair amount of fear and doubt.

Soon after that, he'd be in an assisted living facility in another county.  Soon after that, he would be no more. Lance pushed the barriers and challenged the world, but in the end, he grew weary of it, and wounded and broken, he lay down to die.

Love! Vallor! Compassion! is a play about a man with aids that helped make Nathan Lane a star.  They're also words to describe a man I loved--who hung in the sky like a comet for fifty years at Millsaps and then moved further out into space.  

Believing in Jackson - Great City Mississippi