Feet on the Street (8 page)

I never got anywhere with the novel I'd been trying to write. My parents and sister came to town for a few days. I introduced Matthew to them, but he didn't say much, self-conscious about his speech defect, I figured. My mother said he seemed nice. I showed the folks around New Orleans and “we had a very happy time,” according to my diary. My father displayed the sort of adult male behavior I was accustomed to: “They went shopping for antiques yesterday while I was at work, and Daddy went with them though they suggested he stay here and read since he wouldn't enjoy it, and he
didn't
enjoy it, obviously, and got tired, so they had to come back early.”

My New Orleans diary ends with my parents' visit. I didn't write about the last time I saw Matthew. It was a sweltering August night, my last in town. I was relieved to be leaving there to see Ellen, my future wife, in Texas. Matthew and I had dinner, we walked back to my apartment, and as I was unlocking the door to the courtyard, he said, “Don't you
realize
that I feel affection for you,
physicall
y
? Are you so insensitive, or naïve—”

Both. I went through the door and banged it shut, never looked back. The worst thing you could be, back home, was queer. I didn't even want to be, anyway. In Texas I got a letter from Matthew, saying he wanted to send a story I'd shown him (and which in fact was no good) to Caroline Gordon, the novelist and critic. If I wrote him back at all, it wasn't nicely. I told Ellen about it, how traumatic it had been for me. It didn't interest her much.

I told her I needed her (to reassure me, I guess), and she didn't like that at all. This confirmed my belief that outward need is counterproductive. I have erred in the other direction ever since. As far as I can tell. And every time I come to New Orleans I play that scene with Matthew back.

In my defense I could mention that he had referred to homosexuals, as if in sympathy, as “those people.” But when he opened his heart, my reaction had not been even cryptically sympathetic, and let's just put it in professional terms: it is not a good idea for a writer to let himself get away with consigning anybody to any category of
those.

When you get startled negatively, that bad energy stays with you until you use it either to lash out or to expand your sympathy. New Orleans is a place of exploration and masquerade, a place where a person can play roles, try on other identities. So okay, say I put myself in the place of a female student whose professor takes up a lot of time with her and suddenly puts his hand on her knee. I think, being her,
He doesn't think I'm smart, he just wants to get into my pants.

No, this isn't working. In the first place, part of me is sympathizing with the professor already. He probably thinks you're smart (great, now I'm thinking of the female student as
you
)
and
he wants to get into your pants, the poor, aging dumpy son of a bitch. Not that I would ever do anything that out of line. But I can imagine how he feels. Show him you're smart, by moving your knee.

In the second place, what I tried to assume I would think, if I were the student with the knee, is not what I thought. I was already guiltily weary of Matthew's intellectual attention. To realize that it was excessive, because semi-glandular, should have been a relief.

Wait. Now I
am
getting a flash of solidarity with the female student. Let's say you're me, okay, and I'm a woman whose knee
you
put a hand on, literally or figuratively but at rate not heavily (
you
think, because it's your hand), and I (the one with the knee) recoil. Well, jeez, she didn't have to
recoil,
you're probably thinking, and your hand is feeling like a rotten mackerel. At least that's what
I
would probably have been thinking, if the one with the hand had been me. But what
you're
feeling . . .

I can't keep track. So okay, here's how I felt: dumb. And preyed upon. It wasn't as if he'd said anything mean. But you know how you feel naked when you get a sense that somebody feels naked toward you. And you shudder a little, with appetite if you like it, with dread if you don't. Maybe everybody, not just oysters, is all morsel at heart. And I'm a guy, how would I know how to turn down sex politely?

Well, no. If Matthew had been a woman . . . Let's face it: here I am writing a book about New Orleans, and I have felt homophobia. I'll say this for me, I didn't like it.

But I can't mark it all down to horror of relationships in which you discuss the relationship. Over the years, of necessity, I have advanced to the point that I can have such a relationship, but not with men. With men, it's what I am tempted to call (in the sense that a song is higher than an affidavit), a higher level of communication: funny stories. Like the one about the three bulls who hear that a new bull is coming to the pasture and one of them says, “I got a dozen cows that are all mine, as you well know, and he ain't getting any of them.”

Second bull says, “I got nine cows, and if he thinks he's touching a one of
them,
he's got another thing coming.”

Third bull says, “Well, I got only the two, but they're mine and I'm keeping them.”

Then the new bull arrives. He jumps out of the van and hits the ground snorting. He's big, he's black, he's rippling all over. He's looking around the pasture, getting ready to stake his claim.

“Well,” says the first bull, “I do have more cows than I need, I reckon, and if he wants a few, you know . . .”

“I'm of that way of thinking, too, I believe,” says the second bull. “No point in being too selfish.”

The third bull starts snorting, bellowing, swelling up his chest, and pawing the dirt.

The first and second bull say, “Hey, whoa, what in the world are you doing? That new bull is going to see you.”

“That's right,” says the third bull, “and I want to be sure he knows I'm a bull.”

Dread of gender-malleability. My friend Slick, in the twenty-five years I knew him, was burly, bearded, and hearty, a small-plane pilot and motorcycle racer at ease with firearms and in rough milieux. In his prime he appealed readily to adventurous women. We are speaking now of the seventies and early eighties, when Americans looked to Willie Nelson, not Donald Trump, as an exemplar of the good life. So I am not talking about weirdly sleek models who appear to have been turned out according to corporate guidelines—I'm talking about rowdy women of spirit who skinny-dip, suck crawfish heads (the only way to do justice to a mess of whole boiled ones), and appreciate George Jones. Slick knew at least two along those lines in New Orleans alone. One, in particular, who joined us one evening while we were working up to looking for orphans, let's call her Miranda. She was great looking without discernible makeup, she was funny, she loved oysters, she was earthy
and
sparkly, and she was a reader.

When I say
reader
I don't mean of books about whether there can ever be any truly emotional life anymore in the vacuum left by some lout who was her whole world and didn't have any feelings, himself, I mean real fiction, serious fiction: fiction
about
fiction. In New Orleans she had just been reading the Italo Calvino novel
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.
Damn. Whereas Slick—now Slick was a reader himself, for a photographer, but Slick hadn't been reading Italo Calvino. I hadn't either, but I had read reviews of that Calvino novel and could have faked it. If Miranda had been severe and pale, reading Calvino would not have been a plus, but this woman—you figured you could take her anywhere, goat-roast or film festival, and she'd bring something welcome to the party. She actually quoted something from that novel that made my eyes go googly. Later I tracked it down and recorded it: “What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.”

I left Miranda and Slick dancing in the hotel ballroom and went sullenly off to bed. I was lying there in a state of far too measurable time and space—faithfully but not at that time very happily married, unaccompanied and bursting with oysters—when I heard Slick's voice through the wall. He had the room next to mine. “I used to be built like a Greek god,” he was saying. “Now I'm built like a god-damn Greek.” That lovely woman (who thank God was
not
my destiny because she who is, is so much better, but still) made a tolerantly amused noise and I put the pillow over my head.

I have heard people justify opposition to gay marriage on the grounds of
ick
factor: they cringe at imagining what people of the same sex (pretty lesbians in some cases excepted) do in bed together. But on that basis, you wouldn't want your parents to be married. I can't think of any actual couple that I would feel right about picturing actually doing it except Elvis and Ann-Margret. Attractive people, whom I never met personally, and I don't think they'd mind.

What I am coming to, though, is that toward the end of his life, when he was struggling to stay sober, Slick e-mailed me some reflections on his life, one of which startled me. As a boy he was so pretty and delicate-featured, he wrote, that he knew from an early age he would have to make an extra effort to establish that he had, as he put it, “definite lesbian tastes.”

One of Slick's jokes, to be sure, some of which were better than others, but the more I thought about it—if you looked, you could see traces of those fine features.

He had aesthetic tastes. Before his lip was smashed in a car wreck, he'd been a professional trumpet player. For years he conducted Nashville Symphony musicians at the Fourth of July picnic he helped organize. He cooked, painstakingly, great gumbo and seafood. By far the least grizzled and most sensitive portrait of Willie Nelson that I have seen is Slick's picture of him on the cover of the great album
Phases and Stages.

Slick had romantic tastes, too, even in marriage. On January 1, 2001, when he was divorced, and his photography business was shot, and he'd alienated many of his friends, he sent me a nostalgic e-mail about New Year's Eves. Especially the one he and his wife Susan had spent, in formal attire, in a decorator friend's show window. The window display had “lots of chiffon and silver. We drank Cristal champagne, ate Krystal burgers, and had white ties on Buster and Sister.” Buster was their three-legged dog and Sister their free-range cat. “We drew a strange crowd of homeless and fancy people and we never looked them in the eye.”

Now, several years later, fewer people made eye contact with him. “For the last few years, I usually dressed up in a tux and went over to Sperry's [a Nashville bar] just before the ball drop. I untied my tie and let the society crowd wonder what I got invited to that they didn't. My first New Year, which I don't remember, was when I was eleven days old. I was the New Year's Baby at the Three-Mile Inn in Monroe. It is reported that I was carried around the room by Fats Waller. I guess that makes me the bouncing sixty-four-year-old continuous bar-hopper. This year my string was halted. I stayed home last night and read a book.” Before the next New Year, he gave up on drying out and was found dead, at home, all dressed up to go out.

Rambling anywhere with Slick, working or playing, and it was hard to tell the difference, was like being in New Orleans. As Jelly Roll Morton said of Gypsy Shaeffer's house in Storyville, “There was everything in the line of hilarity there.” Once when Slick was riding on a New Orleans riverboat, the calliope broke down. He stepped in, took the calliope apart, and fixed it. If he was, in fact, making a point of externalizing testosterone, the way he went about it was so droll and, well, I guess the expression is balls-out, that it never occurred to me that he might be compensating for the way people looked at the way he looked as a boy. Maybe Slick's dynamic derived in part from self-denial. Shades of Robert E. Lee! Except Lee was the opposite: he suppressed whatever rough and ribald side he might have had, but didn't mind looking beautiful, because his was such a Roman handsomeness. Whereas, the more I think about it, you could have boiled Slick down to a cherub.

In retrospect, though, he was, like New Orleans, a bit much. Is New Orleans overcompensating for something? Slavery, maybe, or the Duc d'Orleans's underwear? Tennessee Williams said New Orleans gave him “a kind of freedom I had always needed. And the shock of it against the Puritanism of my nature has given me a subject which I have never ceased exploiting.” Maybe New Orleans is overcompensating for the rest of America.

Slick was a character. He sometimes called himself Captain America. In one of his last e-mails to me, he reported that rehab had finally convinced him he was “clinically depressed, using whiskey as an anesthetic.” He hardly ever got any sleep. That's one thing he had in common with New Orleans, and with Matthew. “Until about two a.m. there's always so many people up to do things with,” Slick would complain back when he was drinking and thriving and popular, “and then for another hour or so there might be somebody I could
find
who's up, to do something with, and after that I can't sleep for the stars going scritchy, scritchy, scritchy against one another.” In his last years it must have been mostly Slick alone with the stars.

And I knew that, and I didn't call him up very often to see how he was doing. That time when he cried, I hugged him, which was highly unusual, and when I got back home I sent him some books and stuff, and I had him introduce me at a reading shown on C-Span once, but I think if I'd been in Slick's place and he'd been in mine, he would have done more. With lagniappe. Of course he would have been up and needing somebody to call. Who knows what anybody else's place is like?

At Slick's funeral I told his lifeguard story and our orphan-story story, and testified that on many an occasion his buoyancy had been my frog feet, which was the simple truth.