Clear Springs

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  The Hilltoppers always welcomed us. Don and Seymour got out of the Army and took their rightful places in the group. They were boyish, modest, and funny. I adored them. Being a groupie in the fifties was as innocent as pie. The Hilltoppers never even swore around me, except once—the day Jimmy forgot the words to “My Cabin of Dreams,” which they lip-synched on a TV show. They took a protective attitude toward me, and they were crazy about my mother, who didn’t put on any airs just because she knew some stars. “I think it’s nice they’ve got that Cadillac and ain’t stuck-up,” Mama said. She kept talking about those Tony Martin suits and how good the Hilltoppers would look in them.

  In a way, the Hilltoppers weren’t real to me. They were stars. If they walked into my house today, I’m sure Jimmy Sacca would give me one of his big bear hugs and we would fall easily into joking conversation. We were friends; but even though I spent a lot of time with the Hilltoppers during my high school years I knew very little about them. I didn’t ask about their backgrounds—their parents, brothers and sisters, schooling, and the rest. Background had no meaning to me, because I hadn’t been anywhere; where I was going was what counted.

  I finally got to Detroit when the Hilltoppers played the Michigan State Fair. I went by myself, on the Brooks bus, because my mother had just given birth to my brother, Don. She named him after one of the Hilltoppers, Don McGuire. In Michigan, I was supposed to call Mama’s aunt Mary, in Pontiac. Her husband had died, and her brother Rudy was reported to have become a millionaire from working in a tire plant, saving his money, and living in a hut.

  In Detroit that week, I stayed with a girl in my fan club whose father was a maintenance engineer at the Ford plant. They lived in a suburb in a gleaming new house with a guest room, and they fed me piles of tiny White Castle hamburgers and rich Hungarian cream cakes. I was so busy with the Hilltoppers, I kept putting off my telephone call to Aunt Mary. She did not know where I was staying or how to contact me. Pontiac was far away from where I was staying, and I didn’t want to miss the shows at the fair. I was living in another world now—where the tall buildings were. And I appeared with the Hilltoppers on Soupy Sales’s TV show. I remember answering questions about the fan club and someone throwing a pie. Eydie Gormé was also at the fair—before she married Steve Lawrence and they became Steve and Eydie. Eydie told me she admired my pixie haircut. Some weeks later, I saw her on TV and she had had her hair pixied. But the head-liners at the fair were Bill Haley and the Comets and Billy Ward and the Dominoes. My life was astir with such sounds that were emerging from the familiar old Saturday night radio show Daddy and I had listened to for years; behind the roaring train of rock-and-roll, the Hilltoppers’ style began to seem slightly quaint, a caboose.

  I never got around to calling Aunt Mary. After I reached Mayfield, on the all-night bus, I learned that Mary had telephoned my parents, worried about me. It shocked me that a relative, planted far away and seemingly disconnected, would be so concerned about me. As it happened, I never saw Mary again, and it was years before I gave any thought to her brother Robert, my lost grandfather.

  The day my mother and I drove to a show in Blytheville, Arkansas, was the day the Russians sent up Sputnik. After the Hilltoppers’ show, Don drove back to Mayfield with us in our Nash Rambler; he planned to get the bus to his home in Owensboro. As we rode through the night, listening to Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Elvis Presley on an after-hours show from New Orleans, we were aware of Sputnik spying on us.

  I noted the Sputnik launch in my 1957 diary:

  OCTOBER 4. Blytheville, Ark. Cotton Ball. Hilltoppers and Jimmy

  Featherstone Ork. Russian sattelite, Sputnik, launched.

  NOVEMBER 3. Sputnik II.

  NOVEMBER 7. 40th anniversary of Russian Revolution. President

  Eisenhower’s address to the nation. Senior rings.

  NOVEMBER 15. UFO sightings increase.

  DECEMBER 11. English theme, “National Security.” A+

  That fall, when I was a senior, a girl named Janine Williams went with my mother and me to see the Hilltoppers at a ballroom in a little town in Tennessee. Janine made a great impression on the Hilltoppers with her teasing, flirtatious personality. All the crinolines she wore under her dress made her look ready for flight, for a trip into outer space. “My brother went to Louisville to the basketball tournament last year,” she told the Hilltoppers. “He won the tickets, and he flew up there in an airplane. And he stayed in the same hotel as the teams.”

  This was an outright lie—I didn’t know why she told it—but the Hilltoppers didn’t know the difference, so I didn’t know what to say. I was happy, though, showing off the Hilltoppers to my friend. Jimmy introduced both of us to the audience at a special moment in the show before the group sang “To Be Alone,” in which Don did an Ink Spots–style monologue in his surprising bass voice and caused girls to squeal. (He had cherubic looks.) The Hilltoppers had a new record, “Starry Eyes,” and I was disappointed when they didn’t sing it. I was afraid their new record wasn’t going to be a hit, and I was getting frustrated with the power of positive thinking. I hadn’t told the Hilltoppers about the ESP experiments I had been trying (they involved sending telepathic messages to d.j.s to play Hilltoppers tunes). I was afraid they would laugh.

  “What do you think of Elvis Presley?” Janine asked the Hilltoppers later. Elvis Presley was singing “All Shook Up” on the radio of the Cadillac as Jimmy drove us out to a café for hamburgers.

  “He’s great,” said Seymour. “He has a fine voice.”

  “If I could wiggle like that, we’d make a million dollars,” Jimmy said.

  Don laughed. “Our manager had a chance once to manage Elvis Presley, but he turned it down. He said nobody with a name like ‘Elvis’ would get anywhere.”

  “I like Elvis,” Mama said. “He can really carry a tune.”

  For me, there was something as familiar about Elvis as our farm, with the oak trees and the cows and the chickens. It was as though Elvis were me, listening to WLAC and then coming up with his own songs about the way he felt about the world. I tried not to think too hard about Elvis, but I couldn’t help it. Janine had said to me, “If I got Elvis in a dark corner, I’d tear his clothes off.”

  With the arrival of rock-and-roll, the Hilltoppers had begun recording livelier imitations of black tunes—“The Door Is Still Open,” “Only You,” and Ruth Brown’s “Teardrops from My Eyes.” On some of the songs, you could hear a rock-and-roll saxophone or a boogie piano and even a bass vocal “bum-bum-bum” against the “do-do-do-do-do-do-do” background harmony. I was ready to embrace the new and outlandish, whether it was rock-and-roll or jazz or sack dresses—a hot style from France one year. (Mama made me one.) I was reading The Search for Bridey Murphy, The Practical Way to a Better Memory, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Reincarnation: A Hope of the World impressed me. I was filled with philosophical questions, and I wrote a paper for English class on agnosticism. My teacher, Miss Florence, summoned me to her office and accused me of plagiarism. “Young lady, you have no business entertaining ideas like this,” she said. “Where did you get such an idea?”

  I quaked. “I read about it. I read lots of philosophy,” I said, which was only partly a lie. Reincarnation was philosophy, sort of. I told her I had read John Locke, which was a lie. But I hadn’t plagiarized. I really believed it was possible that God did not exist, and furthermore it seemed likely that there was no way to know whether He did or not.

  Miss Florence had lavender hair, and she kept a handkerchief tucked in her sleeve. Now and then she daintily plucked it out and snuffled into it. She was a terrifying woman, much admired by the whole town. Everyone since the thirties, including Daddy, had been in her senior English class. Her sister, Miss Emma, was the teacher who had flunked Daddy in algebra.

  “Take my advice,” Miss Florence said, growing softer. “Give up these strange ideas of yours. Your field is mathematics. That’s what you’re good at. Stay away from
these peculiar questions, because they’re destructive. And stick with the Bible. That’s all the philosophy you’ll ever need.”

  I was silent, rigid with fury—too intimidated to speak.

  “You have a lot of big ideas, but they will lead you astray,” Miss Florence said in dismissal.

  At school, the Hilltoppers were my secret. In Mayfield, I was an outcast, but in the greater world I could be suave and self-important. It was as though I could slip into a telephone booth and change into my National President cape, ready to assume my powerful role. When d.j.s interviewed me, I spoke glibly in Billboard lingo. “Well, Ed, this new platter is slated to be a chart-buster,” I said to Ed Bonner on KXOK, in St. Louis. I had my own stationery, with a Hilltoppers logo. After Miss Florence’s edict, I immersed myself in my presidential duties, publishing my bimonthly newsletter, Hilltoppers Topics. Running a fan club was expensive, but the Hilltoppers sent me ten dollars a week for expenses and fifteen dollars a week for myself. I saved all my money for college. I started hating math.

  My mother had been serious about those Tony Martin suits. Shortly before my graduation, the Hilltoppers came to Mayfield, and Mama whisked them off to the Merit and got them measured. They picked out an off-white material with a subtle gray stripe in it. Later, when the suits were finished, Mama went to the Merit and personally sewed in the labels. That spring, I was a soda jerk at the Rexall drugstore in Mayfield, making fifty cents an hour, and after school that day I was drawing a Coke from the fountain for one of the regulars when all four of the Hilltoppers strolled into the store. It was my big moment. I could show them off. A classmate of mine, a popular cheerleader—an uptown girl who always made me feel like a shabby bumpkin—was testing nail polish at the cosmetics counter. I rushed over and told her I would introduce her to the Hilltoppers. “They’re here,” I said, pointing to the end of the counter, where I had served them Cokes.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said, flashing her cheerleader smile. “I wouldn’t know what to say.” With two fingernails painted Persian Melon, she hurried out the back door. The Hilltoppers scared her.

  It was a triumph, sort of. I got off work early, and the Hilltoppers drove me home in the Cadillac. Mama made a huge catfish supper, with hush puppies and slaw and blackberry pie, and that evening my family and I all went to Paducah and saw the Hilltoppers sing at the National Guard Armory with Blue Barron’s orchestra. It was a perfect day. “Your mother is an amazing woman,” Don said to me.

  The Hilltoppers were so conventional, such nice guys. I didn’t know how to talk to them about the crazy thoughts in my head. I had just received a reply to my letter to George Adamski, the man who claimed in his book about UFOs to have been on a spaceship to Venus. He thanked me for writing and assured me that he had indeed been to Venus, but he failed to answer my questions about the spacecraft’s interior and the landscape of Venus.

  That summer, I picked blackberries in the early-morning dew with rock-and-roll songs like “Get a Job” by the Silhouettes and Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” blasting in my mind, and in the afternoons I trudged down the dusty lanes through the fields with the current dog to round up the herd of cows. In the evenings, I worked at the Rexall. I went out with boys—boys who wanted to settle down and work in the new factories—but I wasn’t impressed. I was always dreaming. From our house I could see the traffic on Highway 45, which ran straight south to Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis was born. I knew he had dreamed the same dreams.

  Miss Florence refused to write me a recommendation to Duke University, where I wanted to study parapsychology with the famous Dr. J. B. Rhine, so in the fall I went away to the University of Kentucky, in Lexington. I neglected my fan-club duties and failed to get Hilltoppers Topics out on schedule. I read Brave New World and 1984 and Mandingo and Elmer Gantry. I studied French and psychology and philosophy and volleyball. After hours, I still listened to John R jive-talking along with Ruth Brown and Little Walter and Jimmy Reed. Buddy Holly died that winter. Elvis was in the Army.

  A year later, I saw the Hilltoppers for the last time, at a nightclub in Louisville, where they were performing with Mel Tormé. I had driven over with some girls from U.K. The Hilltoppers’ popularity had declined drastically. They were being eclipsed by rock-and-roll. In their tuxedos or in their Tony Martin suits, they never really got the hang of it. I remember Don and Seymour sitting at a table in a corner with me that night in Louisville. They were as kind as ever—funny and generous, the way I always remember them. I had on a black cocktail dress with a taffeta balloon-hem. “Those U.K. boys better watch out,” Don said, teasing me.

  Shyly, I told them about breaking up with my boyfriend. He was going with some other girl and my life was in ruins, but I didn’t go into detail. I apologized for letting my club work slip. The newsletter was two months late.

  Don smiled. “It’s about time you forgot about the fan club,” he said.

  “No, it’s not,” I said loyally.

  “You’ll have other interests,” he said. “You’ll get married, and have your own family.”

  “I don’t know.” I thought I would never get married.

  “People change and go on to something else,” Don said. “We won’t stay with this forever. It’s no way to live—one dinky ballroom after another. Traveling around all the time isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.”

  “Even in a Cadillac?” I asked.

  “Even in a Cadillac,” Don said, smiling again. “By the way, we’ll drop you off in Lexington tomorrow.”

  “Thank you,” I said. It was my last chance to travel in their Cadillac, I thought—a good way to end my national presidency. They had traded in the blue Fleetwood for a newer, black model. I imagine it even now, rushing through the night, unrestrained in its flight, charging across America.

  It was after midnight when Mel Tormé finished his set, but the band wouldn’t quit. The crowd was wild. Jimmy took the microphone again. He sang “I Can’t Get Started,” a droopy-drawers sort of song. He had had a couple of drinks, and he was in mellow spirits. Then he eased into “St. James Infirmary.” As the deep sadness of the song emerged, he suddenly became real to me, not a star. “St. James Infirmary” was slow and bluesy, but it wasn’t a droopy-drawers song. It was the meanest, low-downest, saddest song I ever heard. I thought I would die. It was after hours, way down South in Dixie. It was 1959.

  13

  Then came the sixties. The rolling stone of history knocked me down, rolled me over, and pushed me out. At the University of Kentucky I declared myself a math major, as Miss Florence had directed, then tuned out when calculus departed from charming puzzles to dull engineering applications involving bridges and water towers. I wandered among majors. Learning was like a buffet, and I wanted to devour everything. Indiscriminately, I sampled etymology, existentialism, the theater of the absurd, Shakespeare, French symbolists, realism, naturalism, logic, Jack Kerouac. Dada and surrealism followed my Rimbaud period. I didn’t consult a guidance counselor. One of my primary traits—coming from the independent spirit of generations of farm people—was the refusal to seek advice or ask directions. I preferred to blunder along, exactly the way Daddy did on the occasions when he and Mama drove me to school in Lexington. Sometimes on the way home they would take a side trip, blazing trails. Daddy wouldn’t consult a map.

  No one told me what to do. Nobody talked about where learning was headed, what it was for. As far as I knew, it was meant to be nothing more than a reprieve from the necessity of labor. I knew I would have to get a job after college, and I had shorthand and typing from high school to bank on. I figured I would go to a city. I would not work outdoors. I would work in an office or a store. I couldn’t imagine that anybody would pay me to read or write the kind of books I cared about. Still, after discovering Thomas Wolfe and J. D. Salinger, I switched my major to English. Miss Florence was not there to make me mind, so I rushed headlong into the dangers of literature.

  And without a second thought,
I moved to New York the day after graduation. I craved change and excitement—and all the tourist attractions. Going to the big city did not seem bold or brave to me. It merely seemed inevitable. New York had burned its authority into my brain long ago, when I watched Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show and listened to Martin Block’s Make-Believe Ballroom from WABC, broadcast on an affiliate station. I had been to New York once, on a school trip my sophomore year at U.K. Our group toured the United Nations, the Bowery, and Broadway, and we heard beatnik poetry at a coffeehouse, the Gaslight. My college creative-writing teacher, Robert Hazel, insisted on New York. He booted his students right out of the provinces. “Get out of this backwater Podunk,” he urged. “Go get some experience. You can’t be a writer unless you’ve lived intensely.” New York was the place.

  Robert Hazel was a seductive personality, an engaging man who made all his students believe they could be writers. We fell for his romantic portrait of the artist. Professor Hazel had published books. His photograph on one of the jackets was a brooding, handsome profile. He emulated F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was my literary hero. For all of his writing students, Professor Hazel embodied the glamour of the writing life. He frequently talked about “Bill” Styron and “Phil” Roth, as if they were old buddies of his. He spoke knowledgeably of jazz and art. He would tell what Miles said to Coltrane at some bar in such a way that you thought he was in thick with them.

  So I headed to New York. There, I thought, I could get a job in an office, working at a typewriter, while I checked out the Greenwich Village scene and gathered material—gritty street life, colorful characters—to write about. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I thought I didn’t have much to write about yet. In New York I would soak up life, as Robert Hazel—and Louisa May Alcott—had said, and take notes. In any case, I would not have to pick blackberries again.