Toilet Trouble

 Before he went to Millsaps, my grandfather had never used a toilet before.  Founder's Hall had one.  (They would install a ladies' room before they tore it down.)  The KA House had a single-seater that I'm sure they kept as pristine and clean as the ones in the KA House now.

Where he came from, people didn't have toilets.  They had outhouses and chamber pots.  When we went to homecoming in the seventies, his little Methodist church in Hesterville had a port-a-potty where the outhouse used to be.  The only one willing to use it was my cousin Libba Wingate, who had trouble holding her water after childbirth.  Delta women act like they're frail as lace and require our constant protection and supervision.  It is a lie.  They've been climbing trees and shooting doves since they were four, and any man who falls for that trap deserves what they get.

In those days, there weren't that many buildings in all of Mississippi that had toilets.  Pretty soon, though, indoor plumbing became common, and every public building had bathrooms for three genders: Male, Female, and Colored.  If you think it causes a commotion now when somebody uses the wrong bathroom, try letting a white woman use the colored toilet in 1940.  They would have found a way to send three black men to jail for that.

After the sexual revolution of the seventies, people who had different ideas about how to express their gender started to feel like they had more freedom to do so.  Some people feel very threatened if they start to lose control over gender expression, and almost immediately, they become uncomfortable with the sexual revolution.  

A few years ago, internet trolls decided that if there was anything they hated more than transgender people, it was furries, so they started spreading the story that elementary schools in California had to install "litter box" bathrooms in all their schools for students who identify as furries.  It's not true, of course, but the trolls had a grand time watching guys with MAGA hats spew their nonsense on YouTube.  If you think about it, I'm sure you know somebody who has heard this story and believes it.

So, where does all this gender ideology and multiple bathroom business lead?  Where does it end?

A few days ago, in Iran, a sixteen-year-old girl was beaten to death by the "morality police" because she dared to uncover her hair on the train.  It's not the first time this has happened.  In Iran, women covering their heads is part of their gender ideology.  

It's so easy for us to hold ourselves as morally superior to Iran, but fifty years ago, they were the country in the Middle East that was the most like us.  They had a very popular, democratically elected prime minister, who made the mistake of trying to Huey Long, the British Persian Oil company, so the CIA had him taken out and replaced by a puppet, and they changed the name to British Petroleum and pretended like nobody did anything.  Twenty years later, the puppet government we installed was taken over by the Islamic Brotherhood, and an awful lot of law-abiding, peaceful Persians had to move to the United States.  

This girl was sixteen.  All she wanted was to express her gender identity in her own way, and she died for it.  She died because the adults in Iran believed they had to control these things, that it was madness to let a sixteen-year-old decide for herself whether or not to show her hair.  

I'm not saying that's where it will end in this country, but these things are a spectrum, and we're on the spectrum.  We like to think we're so very different from Iranians and so very different from them, but are we.

There are two kinds of people in the world.  Those who believe all cultural matters must be tightly regulated and controlled, and then there are people who believe that bacchanalia can sometimes be useful, that you have to let people express themselves in their own way, or it ends in tragedy.  

Story Idea - Time Travel

 I have this idea for a story. It borrows from other stories so, we'll see. The details are likely to change.

In the late 40s a boy named Tommy is ten years old and a student at Duling Elementary School in Jackson, MS. His teacher is Miss Becker. She's twenty-three and beautiful. Tommy's father died recently, and he stutters so he's extremely shy and has no friends. Miss Becker befriends him and tries to help him feel better about his situation.

One day, Tommy says "Miss Becker, I don't know what I'd do without you, when I get as old as you I'm going to marry you!" Miss Becker laughs

One night, there's a huge flash of light and Tommy wakes up in a room with glowing white walls and strange figures are around him. The figures are from the future. Their bodies look strange because humans no longer use their physical bodies. They've expanded his mind so he can understand what they say to him.

In the future, humans can travel in time, but they can only observe. They can't make any changes. Time travel is a device for their historians. Their machines can visit any point or place in time, before the date the machine was turned on. As their machines pass through time, their machines pass by unnoticed by the people living the regular time line, but one in a billion will become attached to the machine as it goes by, and Tommy was one in a billion.

They don't have a way to return Tommy to his body so he can live out his life, but they can return his mind to bodies of people who are moments from dying, and he can live our their lives, or a part of their lives.

There's a flash, and Tommy wakes up in the body of a twenty year old. Miss Becker is now seven. Realizing their roles in time have changed, Tommy gets a job at the school as a custodian. He watches Miss Becker grow up, but tries not to ever have her notice him.

When he turns thirty five, there's another flash and Tommy wakes in in 1969, he's a sophomore at Murrah High School, and Miss Becker (Now Mrs Thompson) is the principal. She has a husband and children.

There are a few more flashes, and a few more changes of age and relative ages between them, and one day he's at a facility like St. Catherines. Tommy is eighty-nine with COPD. Miss Becker is 92 and has progressing alzheimers.

Miss Becker can't remember the present, but she can remember the past. She and Tommy become friends. They are in different parts of the facility, but he visits her ever day. Because her mind is disjointed and floats around in time, Tommy is the only one she can really communicate with. Tommy is the only one who knows he's shared all these experiences with Miss Becker, but in different bodies.

One day, Miss Becker says her friend Tommy promised to marry her. It becomes all she can talk about. Her daughter asks Tommy if he actually has asked her to marry him, and he says he hasn't, but another boy named Tommy did, a long time ago.

Miss Becker starts to get upset if anybody tries to tell her she's not going to marry Tommy. She doesnt' recognize Tommy in this new body with a new name. Finally, Tommy says, he can't legally marry Miss Becker because of her illness she can't give consent, but if it will make her calmer and happy to pretend to get married, he'll do it.

The doctors are unsure about this idea, but they know she may not remember it the next day, and even if she did, neither she nor Tommy had very much time left.

The nurses push the wheelchairs together, and they have a pretend wedding with Tommy and Miss Becker holding hands. When she says "I Do", she looks at Tommy, for the first time, and realizes who he is, and how he's always been with her, but she's too weak to talk about it. That night, both Tommy and Miss Becker pass away in their sleep.

One Brief Shining Moment in Mississippi

For two hundred years, Mississippi was ruled by a cabal of single-issue (or nearly single) Democrats.  You couldn’t even say they were conservatives.  On issues like women voting, federal parks, trust-busting, and the gold standard, we were pretty moderate to liberal.   For anything involving race, dancing, or drinking, we were the most conservative voices out there.  

During the sixties, the ice began to melt around the heart of some Southern Democrats with regards to race (Thanks for Lyndon B Johnson) and drinking.  While most of Mississippi hated the change, by 1970, you could tell things were beginning to move.

By the seventies, clearly, there was a major change coming.  Conservative, single-issue (race) Mississippians began changing to the Republican party.  People who were more moderate on the race issue became moderate Democrats, and for a very brief while, they held most of the power in Mississippi.

I won’t describe the “Southern Strategy” the way Lee Atwater did, although he laid it out pretty honestly.  To paraphrase what he said: In the past, all you had to do was use overtly racist language, and conservative Southerners were all behind you.  Things changed in the sixties.  Nobody wanted to be associated with racist language, so they began speaking in code.  Any program that people perceived to be more of a help to black Americans than white Americans could be used to create a fear that the program would embolden the presumed baser nature of Africans and, therefore, a danger to whites.  

Despite the success of the Southern Strategy, In Mississippi, some new voices and new ideas could be heard, and for a while, they were growing.  

I don’t know if you can accurately say if my dad was either liberal or conservative.  He didn’t have much patience with a lot of liberal ideas and conservative ideas either.  Like many people, he was very interested in resolving issues of race so we could move on to the other items in the mountain of problems Mississippi had.  More than anything, my dad was Methodist, and that meant moderate.  He didn’t like to rush into anything, but he didn’t like being an idealogue or someone afraid of change either.  He advocated moderately considering your options and then reasonably and moderately dealing with your problems.  Mississippians tend to be bombastic.  This more reasoned approach wasn’t at all popular among some people but very popular among others.

Daddy surrounded himself with other moderates.  I can remember very well listening to my cousin Robert Wingate and his friend Charlie Deaton seriously cuss Ronald Reagan’s PIK program while eating boiled peanuts and tossing the shells into the woods.  To me, that was the core of the Mississippi Delta.

America was in a farm crisis, and Mississippi was getting it worse than most.  Guys who owned their land outright, without any debt, made money with the PIK program.  Most guys didn’t, though.  In Mississippi, it was common for farmers to buy their daddy’s farm, mortgage it to pay their daddy enough money to retire on, and then get back most of the principal from the loan when daddy died.  This went on for generations.  In the seventies, mortgage loan rates went higher and higher and higher, and a lot of guys started having trouble making their mortgage payments and began losing their farms.  Other guys started picking up these valuable farm acres from a bank sale, but then they would get in trouble because they borrowed so much money to do it.  

Some guys were in pretty good shape.  My cousin Richard Huzzey was in pretty good shape because his dad died before the mortgage crisis, and he owned his land outright.  At Millsaps, I was socially involved with a woman whose father wheeled and dealed and picked up almost a thousand acres from bank sales, added to the over a thousand acres he already had.  Romantically and with regard to whiskey, she was a libertine, which worked in my favor.  Financially and in matters of race and culture, she was a conservative, which worked against me.  She was one of the most beautiful women I was ever involved with, but there’s more to it than that, and the fates were against us.  Besides, all that drinking was just about to get me kicked out of Millsaps.

There was a sweet spot in Mississippi moderate politics that stretched from the election of William Winter through Bill Allain till the end of the Mabus governorship when the first-ever Republican governor was elected.  Among the most notable achievements during this era were the Winter and Mabus educational packages and Mike Moore’s stunning victory over the tobacco companies.  People talk about Huey Long’s victory over the oil companies; that aint nothing compared to what Mike Moore accomplished.  Moore had Richard Scruggs in his corner; that might have made a difference.

I went to an Ole Miss football game with my dad, Rowan Taylor, and long-time Mississippi Education leader Bob Fortenberry.  This was when they still had most of the big Ole Miss games in Jackson.  Before the game, after The Pride of the South played the national anthem, the announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm Mississippi welcome to the honorable governor of our state and his wife, Ray Mabus!”  and you could slowly hear boos come out of the student section, that moved like a wave over the rest of the home side of the field.  Mabus had just won a stunning victory for his education bill; what the heck were they booing about?  I looked to my dad to see his response.  “Were we in trouble?”  I thought.  Rowan just said, “I’ll be damned,” under his breath.

This business of new Republicans vs. moderate Democrats came to a head when John Stennis retired.  John Stennis scared the peanuts out of me.  I met him seven or eight times.  By that point in his career, he was entrenched enough that he didn’t have to be polite to anybody he didn’t want to, and a moose-shaped white boy from Jackson was somebody he didn’t want to.  

Running for his seat were two members of the Mississippi House delegation.  Wayne Dowdy, with an office in McComb, and Trent Lott, who is from Grenada but grew up on the coast.  

Lott was gregarious and popular.  He was a cheerleader at Ole Miss and ran for Student Body President.  Out of college, he went to work for Bill Colmer, representing Mississippi in the House.  Colmer was a very typical Dixiecrat.  After Brown v Board of Education, he was an author of the “Southern Manifesto” and presented it door to door in the House, on foot.  I honestly don’t have a lot pleasant to say about Bill Colmer.  When he retired, Tent Lott took over his seat, which was a relief.

Dowdy was a Millsaps Graduate.  He had new ideas about being a Democrat from Mississippi.  For one thing, he believed in the idea of a coalition of white and black voters that could carry him to victory, and it worked.  Even today, you’d think that was a strategy that would work in Mississippi, but often doesn’t.  

The year before, Ray Mabus beat Jack Reed with a similar strategy, so most people, early on, thought Dowdy was a shoo-in.  Lott was convinced Mississippi was ready for a change and pointed to the election of Thad Cochran and George Bush’s success in Mississippi as proof.  The race was pretty close for a while, but as it drew down on the wire, Lott began to pull ahead.  In the end, he won by seven points.

After the election of Lott, it became harder and harder to elect a white Democrat in Mississippi.  The Southern Strategy had taken us over.  

After this point, some parts of Mississippi continued to grow (Oxford being the best example) while other parts of Mississippi started to die (Jackson being the best example.)  Race is still just about the only issue that will win an election in Mississippi, so long as you don’t ever say that it’s race.  

There are a lot of guys now that I look at and think, “Man, I wish you had gotten the chance you deserve.” but Mississippi is different now, and those chances are gone.   There’s absolutely no doubt that Mississippi is in decline.  I’m not really one to point fingers, but it wasn’t always like this.  

Don’t let it be forgot

That once there was a spot

And for one brief shining moment…

Notes On The Girl With The Painted Arm

 In the story, I said that we went to see “Batman” at Mann’s Chinese Theater.  My journals don’t actually say what the movie was.  Batman would have been a bit later on, but I wanted to give the impression that we had “The Perfect Date,” so I picked Batman.  It probably was something pretty mundane.  I tried to visit Mann’s Chinese Theater (originally Grauman's Chinese Theatre, now TLC Chinese Theater) every time I visited Los Angeles.  Besides Madison Square Gardens, it’s probably the most famous movie theater in existence.  Honestly, whatever the movie was, I doubt I would have paid much attention as I was deeply smitten and fascinated by my companion.  I think I’ve given a pretty accurate impression of how deeply passionate Julie was.  There are a lot of things that happened that day that I’ll never write about.  Many years later, and all that’s still pretty personal.  That Sunday still counts as one of my favorite days ever.

The book “Modern Primitives” by V. Vale and Andrea Juno came out in 1989.  It’s generally credited for sparking the body modification craze that took over the nineties.  Until “Modern Primitives,” most people with conspicuous tattoos were either bikers or sailors.  “Modern Primitives” made body modification popular among college students.  Even today, if I see somebody with a developed tattoo, I tend to think “art student,” not “biker.”  Jules was the type of girl who would be on the cutting edge of any fashionable trend, so I’m not surprised she scooped the world on this body modification bandwagon.

Jules (Julie, Julia) was a couple of years older than me.  She had an art degree from USC.  A trust-fund baby, she spent her first two college summers exploring Europe but her last two college summers exploring China and Japan.  Japanese art was a passion of hers.  Every motif on her arm was an exacting replica of a famous Japanese work.  Her tattoo artist traveled from Japan to Hong Kong to Los Angeles.  Julie said her tattoo artist had a world-famous reputation for their tattoos, and people came from all over the world to be her canvas.  

Julie’s tattoo took almost three years to complete.  Her art history professor helped her pick out the works she wanted on her skin, a process that took over a year before she ever had a mark on her body.  Her artist used both traditional and modern, powered tattoo inking tools.  Jules tried to get her tattoo done using traditional tools, but it was too painful, so she switched to the powered ones.  She paid for it out of the trust fund her grandfather set up for her.  She was well aware that she would probably have to occasionally go to have some of the colors refreshed for the rest of her life.  

When I met her, she was “on a break” from college and planned to return for her master’s degree and possibly Ph.D. so that she could teach.  I have no idea if any of that ever happened.  She was great at communicating, and she loved people, so she probably would have been a great teacher.

Traditionally, conservative Jews considered tattoos a very bad idea.  Julie’s mother, although she was born a catholic and converted to Judaism, hated her tattoo.  Her father, it seemed to me, was mostly involved in his daughter’s life by proxy, so if he had much to say about it, she never mentioned it to me.  Her grandmother had been born in Poland and seen quite a lot, so she considered the tattoo “not the worst thing that could happen.”  

Julie’s hair was about six inches longer than shoulder length.  In the front, it had sort of a swoosh, similar to Elvis, which she dyed blonde; the rest was dark brown, made cinnamon brown by the sun on the top layers.  Her mother’s hair was perfectly straight and hung well below her waist.  When I knew Julie,  her mother would be in her fifties.  We never met, but I saw photographs.  If that’s what Julie would look like when she was fifty, then I really fucked up letting that one get away.  

Her father’s story was pretty typical: a Jewish boy who grows up in LA and becomes a lawyer.  I was very interested in her mother’s story, but I never got to hear very much about it.  She was born in Colombia but moved to California as a child.  Jules had family in Colombia and Poland, which she never met.

I’ve made several attempts through the years to find Julie.  She ended up being the third woman with that name I would become entangled with.  They all had unusual and somewhat sad endings.  I called her father’s office a few times over the years and left a message, but never got a callback.  My hope is that Julie got married and changed her name, and that’s why I’ve never been able to find her anywhere.  All I really want is that considering how things happened, I’d really like to know that she was okay, that she had a happy life, and that she was eventually able to have all the things she dreamed about.  Most of us don’t get to have the things we dreamed about.  Considering what she was up against, I wouldn’t be surprised if things didn’t work out for her, but it’d make me very sad.

I don’t like saying I was “in love.”  I don’t think I knew her long enough for that.  I was clearly fascinated by her and remain so forty years later.  Many years ago, in the shadows of the bar at Scrooges, my friend Janie asked me which of all the girls I’d been entangled with did I wish had worked out and become the forever girl.  I gave her a name, then thought about it, and gave her another name.  Forty years later, and I’d probably still give the same name.  The thing that made that girl different from all the other girls was that she never wanted anything from me.  She just liked spending time with me, and talking to me, and just sort of being in my presence.  She wasn’t social climbing or looking for a savior, or a benefactor, or a guardian.  She just enjoyed my companionship.  We still talk.  She’s had a completely different life from me, but I’m sure she still knows there was, and is, something special about her–at least where I was concerned.

Julie was the same way.  Socially, I probably would have been seriously reaching above my grade.  Some of her dad’s clients were awe-inspiring, not to mention famous.  I have no idea what drew her to me.  I asked her a few times, and all she said was that she “saw something.”  What she saw, I guess I’ll never know.  Had she not been schizophrenic, who knows what our lives might have been like?  She was schizophrenic, though, and that changes everything. 

I’m aware that because she was schizophrenic, maybe I shouldn’t trust her attraction to me.  It might have been a symptom of her disease.  It might have been gossamer or a vaper, like the hallucinations schizophrenic people sometimes have.  I’m confident that my feelings for her were genuine.  An art student who grew up in Hollywood, with obsidian black eyes and actual art imprinted on her body, would have been like a wish from a birthday cake for me.  Birthday wishes aren’t real, though, and I would never have wished for the perfect girl who had trouble telling the difference between reality and the voices in her head.  That’s almost a cruel joke.

I’m not the right person to go to if you have a loved one with schizophrenia.  I have very harsh feelings about it.  What I know is that the current research suggests that the principal factor deciding who suffers from it and who doesn’t is genetics.  They’ve known that for quite a while.  Among other things, that suggests that whatever was in my brother that made him Schizophrenic is very likely also in me.  It’s possible there’s a common factor between the genetic markers for schizophrenia, ADHD, and major depression, which would explain a lot.  

There’s ample research suggesting a link between the use of narcotic and psychedelic drugs and a trigger for schizophrenia, especially among boys as they finish puberty and women after childbirth.  One of my best childhood friends had a mother who suffered pretty rough schizophrenic episodes after the birth of her third child.  She also, like many women in her generation, depended on narcotic tranquilizers to deal with being a mother in the sixties and seventies.  My mother would always bring that up when I had something to say about how she handled my brother’s illness.  I also pointed out that it didn’t really help to know that other people were having to go through the same shit we were going through.  I was just sixteen and going through pretty rough problems of my own, but none of that mattered if the whole goddamn world had worse problems than me.  I would have to wait my turn, but my turn never came.

Schizophrenia isn’t really curable.  You can become so much less symptomatic that it eventually becomes unnoticeable.  That being said, it must be pretty horrible living your life wondering when or if the voices would return.  

My brother never became completely asymptomatic.  I think, at some point, being symptomatic was such a part of his life that he just incorporated it.  He never returned to being the person he was before the onset of schizophrenia.  My brother was an extraordinarily gentle creature.  The schizophrenic version of himself was not.  Fortunately, that part of him never fully took over.  There was always enough of his core personality involved to prevent anything like that.  I don’t think I ever gave him enough credit for keeping all that in check.

I always thought that having your own mind betray you was about the worst thing that could possibly happen.  I know what it’s like when your body rebels against its master, but losing your mind is a particularly horrible fate.  As I’ve gotten older, I realize that schizophrenia was just the first assault that might try to take over your mind.  Later in life, you’ll be beset on all sides by forces wanting to rob you of your memories and personality.  Dementia and Alzheimer's are, in many ways, worse than schizophrenia.  Toward the end of his life, my father-in-law forgot that he was no longer my father-in-law and would call to check on me like he did when we were still related.  It hurt me to know that his memories were going, but no assault of age could take away his gentle personality.  When he called, I simply tried to be whatever he wanted me to be, knowing that he might not remember it later.

My brother’s at peace now.  He never had the life he deserved.  His doctor, the one I yelled at, moved away from Jackson, and he got a better doctor, but never anyone who could make it all go away.   I don’t know what happened with Julia.  She took a piece of me with her wherever she ended up.  She deserved happiness and every success, but knowing what I know about schizophrenia, it may never have happened.