by Julia Reed
But really, the lichen was the least of it. Right off the bat, it was as though that car gave me carte blanche to behave as irresponsibly as humanly possible. The first month I had it, I left a rather raucous swimming party on the opposite side of town from home (where I was already an hour or so past curfew) and decided that my hair would dry faster through the sunroof, especially if I was going really, really fast and ignored a couple of stop signs and a light. The cop who pulled me over was unamused by my outfit (damp bathing suit) or my hair (dried straight up in a Bride of Frankenstein do) and carted me off to the jail. I dared not call my father, but he somehow got word of my incarceration and was so suffused with disgust when he arrived at the police station that the memory of his face still scares the bejesus out of me almost forty years later.
That fall I loaded the Celica with a metal footlocker, my stereo, and a box of LPs and drove myself to college at Georgetown, where I became instantly popular with my fellow students who had abided by the rule prohibiting freshmen from having cars. The road trips commenced in earnest. There was the night (after an extremely festive time of it at the Tombs or the Third Edition, I can’t remember which) Bryan Carey, son of then governor of New York Hugh Carey, and I decided it would be a great idea to hit the road right then and there for Albany to surprise his dad. When we left, our compatriots had to push us down the hill on O Street just to jump the car, the first sign that our outing might not be the best idea. Then there was the Sunday that a housemate’s buddy had gotten picked up by the state police for hitchhiking in Kentucky. Clearly, we had to rescue him, and besides, one of our group had a sheet of blotter acid, so we could combine two trips in one. I have a vague recollection that the acid trip, which I’d never tried before, was like the road trip—I mostly wished them both to be over. Far more memorable was the discovery of the just-invented Hardee’s breakfast biscuit, which might well have saved us and which remains one of the great rewards of long nights on the road.
Most of the trips involved the thousand-mile-plus trek home to the Delta from D.C., most often accompanied by my thirty-five-pound long-haired cat, Sam, acquired during my sophomore year, and my most stalwart (to this day) traveling companion, Anne Flaherty, who seemed to every parent (including my own) to be the responsible one, while in reality she was every bit as bad as I was, especially in the car maintenance department. Once, when she took the Celica to our neighborhood service station (when such a thing existed), the Iranian pumping the gas asked her if she’d like him to check the brake fluid. When Anne, busy sunning herself through the open roof, replied with a blasé “I guess,” he became enraged. “You guess? You guess? You do not guess with your life!” The guy was perhaps a tad edgy since it had only been a couple of years since the Ayatollah Khomeini had driven the shah—and him—from his home country, but he had a point. I only wish he’d told me about that oil change thing.
Anyway, we did a lot of guessing with our lives, most notably when we left for Christmas break during an especially cold December. Having spent the evening at Nathan’s, where Anne was employed as the record girl (she sat in a booth and spun records for the customers in the dining room while I dutifully waited for her in the bar), we got a bit of a late start, which meant that it was about 10:00 P.M. when we departed. We were seriously short on cash (I think we had seven dollars between us), but we figured we’d be okay with Anne’s father’s Amoco credit card and the three tangerines and bottle of sherry we’d scrounged for sustenance. Then, somewhere in the mountains of Virginia, we had a blowout.
Now, I had taken driver’s ed from our school’s assistant football coach the summer before I got my license, but I had no idea how to change a tire, and our situation suddenly had me feeling slighted. The thinking at the time had been that if you flirted with Coach O’Brien, he wouldn’t make you learn how, but in retrospect I realize it was because he was carrying two or three spare tires of his own around his middle and he had no more desire to get out into the punishing June heat and humidity than we did. Anne was similarly lacking in this rather crucial skill set, and there was also the problem of locating the jack and the spare in the first place. Since we’d been too under the weather to actually pack, all our clothes and shoes and undergarments had been thrown, loose, into the trunk, and we had to mound them up on the side of the very empty road. After at least an inch of snow had fallen on our belongings and us, and more than a dozen truckers had wisely chosen not to get mixed up with our madness, a lone savior stopped and changed our tire while we held his lighter (which we subsequently lost) so he could see. Soon after we crossed into Tennessee, an Amoco station shone like a beacon, and when we came out, with bulging armloads of Doritos and cigarettes and beer and Snickers, it looked as though we’d robbed the place.
Our Southern odysseys went on for years on end—even after I moved to Orlando, we took the Celica all the way down to Key West—and almost always involved at least one speeding ticket (each) per trip. We racked up so many in the tiny Delta town of Beulah (in our defense, it’s extremely hard to realize it’s a town) we ended up cutting a deal with the justice of the peace, trading pecan pies from Greenville’s Sherman’s grocery store for the tearing up of the tickets.
I thought about the late Judge Arnold the other day (actually, I think about him a lot since the lawyer who facilitated the transaction, my old friend George F. “Boo” Hollowell, Jr., once gave me a julep cup inscribed with the words Judge W. D. Arnold Memorial Speedway that currently holds the pens on my desk). Anyway, I was blowing through his old hometown doing my usual ninety when some part of my reptilian brain kicked in and urged me to slow down. There were no cops in sight, but I had to smile at how little my so-called adult life has evolved. For one thing, I was driving a black car with the sunroof wide open, and Bonnie Raitt, Anne’s and my preferred traveling music, was blaring from the stereo. The car is now a Caddy rather than a Celica (but it’s the first new car I’ve owned since), and Bonnie’s excellent Dig In Deep was playing on SiriusXM rather than a cassette player. It’s no wonder that I take solace in the facts that Boo still maintains a practice in Greenville and Sherman’s, though now a restaurant, makes the same pecan pie.
Though I still spend a ton of time on Mississippi’s byways, it has been a while since Anne and I have hit the road together. Our most recent trips have required commercial air travel, including one to Madrid a few years ago when the sherry I was sipping reminded me of our escapades. We took a lighthearted look down some of our more harrowing lanes and then I actually said something like, “Yeah, but there was always one thing about us. We were smart enough not to go completely over the edge. We instinctively knew when to pull back, when not to go too far.” At this patently ridiculous statement, Anne’s right eyebrow shot up past her hairline and she gave me a look only someone who has known you so long and so deep can give. Then we laughed so hard the entire tapas bar turned to stare. We both knew that we’d been idiots, that the grace of God and dumb luck were the only reasons I’d lived long enough to say something so pompous and she’d lived long enough to hear it. That is: the grace of God, dumb luck, and the power of the mighty Celica, so mistreated yet so giving.
One for the Road
There’s a scene in Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins in which the protagonist, Dr. Tom More, is holed up in the Paradise Estates pro shop with a skinny black kid named Elzee Acree and the slightly unhinged white Colonel Ringo, who has been defending the Christian Kaydettes from Bantu snipers (the book, it should be noted, is set during “a Time Near the End of the World”). In addition to the fact that Percy has here written some of the funniest passages in all of American literature, he highlights two of the more time-honored means by which the average Southerner has managed to enjoy a much-needed drink of whiskey. First, when Tom arrives at the pro shop, he has on his person a pint-size flask—in fact, he has it always, as did, presumably, the young Walker Percy, who grew up in Mississippi at a time when the Early Times both he and Tom preferred was not legally availa
ble. Then there is the restorative concoction requested by the colonel after a bullet grazes his private parts: “Bring me a 7 Up, Elzee.… Now pour out the neck and fill it up from Doc’s bottle there.”
“Pour out the neck.” The very phrase is proof of Percy’s unerring ear and flashes back to teenage dances and Friday nights hanging out with the bad boys underneath the football bleachers before anybody knew how to buy marijuana. A spiked 7 Up, Coca-Cola, or Dr Pepper remains the perfect beverage for foxhole moments, hot days, rural road trips, and places where it is still not very acceptable to be seen imbibing.
Of course, in New Orleans, where I live and near where Percy set his novel, there are few places where the latter is the case. It is legal to drink on the streets, and people persist in drinking while they’re driving. They bring their own drinks into restaurants, and they take the restaurants’ drinks out. The most popular—indeed, beloved—receptacle for all this activity is the plastic or Styrofoam “go cup” (or, to use one of the hokier monikers lately emblazoned on the thing itself, a “Geaux Cup”).
They are in use 24/7, but the time to stock up is Mardi Gras. Since each krewe prints up its own versions and uses them as “throws,” a particularly energetic and focused parade-goer can catch up to a year’s supply. More useful than beads and doubloons or the occasional rubber chicken, they can also be put to immediate good use. In fact, pretty much the only people during a Mardi Gras parade not holding a cup are the riders themselves, who wear the adult versions of sippy cups around their necks so that their hands remain free for throwing. (My ex-husband once rigged up a pedal-operated contraption that sent a fairly steady stream of alcohol into his mouth via a rubber tube that snaked up through his costume—a stroke of ingenuity that may explain why, toward the end of his ride, he hung upside down from his harness without realizing that he was doing so.)
But New Orleans is certainly not the only place where people tote their drinks around. Every single afternoon of my childhood, my father came home from his office, mixed a couple of martinis in the glazed McCarty’s pottery wine cups he and my mother received as wedding presents, and took them with him to pick up his best friend, Nick. The glazed clay kept the drinks cool while they sipped and talked and drove down Nelson Street to see what was happening. I was reminded of this ritual years later when I picked up my friend Keith Meacham in a hired Town Car for a longish ride to Tribeca from the Upper East Side and she emerged from her apartment building with two Scotch-and-waters in sterling-silver julep cups. The driver didn’t know what to make of my delight, but then this was Manhattan and he was from Uzbekistan.
A few years ago, a total stranger from Memphis gave me a go cup printed with one of my father’s more priceless utterances: “She ain’t much in a parlor, but she’s hell in a tonk.” It’s the punch line of a long story that I’d just repeated in a column in the New York Times, and even though the guy had no idea who my father was, he had the good sense to appropriate it. This is a safer bet than buying cups with preprinted logos with slogans that tend toward the hackneyed: “Cheers Y’all!” “When in Doubt Wear Camo,” “Time flies when you’re having RUM!”
Still, there are some good ones. At a dinner party in Montgomery not long ago, my host sent me home with two worth keeping: “S.L.U.T.S” (“Southern Ladies Under Tremendous Stress”) and “D.T.M.D.C.” (which stands for “Don’t Touch My Damn Cup,” helpfully printed with the owner’s name). My cousin Linda Jane also turned me on to some good ones from a store in Baton Rouge called Paper N Things where she buys her own considerable cache. Two, involving the same body part, made me laugh out loud: “Does this cup make my ass look BIG?” and “Your boots may be made for walking but mine are in case I need to kick your ASS.”
As much as I love—and use—a go cup, I also would like to say a few words in praise of the flask. Not only are flasks elegantly shaped and often very beautiful, they are also crucial to have on hand in times of stress, duress, or just plain boredom. Hemingway, not surprisingly, had a lot—you can see his entire collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, where Mary Hemingway sent them from Cuba. Also, there’s nothing sexier than a guy who pulls a proper flask from the inside pocket of his blazer or the hip pocket of his chinos, and casually offers you a nip—a guy a lot like Percy himself, who describes doing that very thing in his seminal essay on bourbon.
In the all too common event that such a man is not around, ladies must learn to keep one discreetly tucked into a handbag. I myself learned this lesson the hard way, during the interminable ritual known in my adopted hometown as the Mardi Gras ball. A ball, unlike a parade, is not an occasion where a lady can waltz around carrying a go cup—until recently ladies weren’t allowed to drink at all unless a male krewe member deigned to duck “backstage” and mix them a clandestine toddy. Even now, it’s not easy. Just prior to the presentation of the debutantes who make up the maids and the queen of the court, the sparsely located bars shut down and everyone is forced to take their seats in uncomfortable hotel ballroom chairs in order to watch an endless stream of girls in white promenade, curtsy, and promenade again for such a long time that you pray to lose consciousness. To the locals, who seem to enjoy themselves immensely, it’s like church—it’s what they do and they’ve been doing it so long that the women, at least, manage to do it without alcohol. Not me. So this year, a year in which I will happily attend because I happen to love one of the debs, I have planned ahead. As I type, I have on my desk beside me a very handsome, gracefully curved, six-ounce flask made of English pewter and inscribed with my initials. It was given to me years ago by my very generous friend Anne Buford, along with a case of very old Macallan Scotch. I drank the Scotch, on the rocks, in a nice heavy glass and forgot about the flask. Until now. It is the perfect size for an evening clutch.
Rocking the Boat
The question is this: is a stereotype bad if the traits it advances are good? I’ve been polling some of my more enlightened friends, and we’ve been forced to conclude that the answer is still yes. If, for example, you are of Chinese descent and, therefore, generally assumed to be pretty damn smart, wouldn’t you prefer that people think of you as intelligent because you, yourself, as an individual, are, in fact, intelligent? I mean, if you’re smart simply by default—by dint of the fact that you happen to be Chinese—you personally don’t get all that much credit.
It’s not a problem I run into. White Southerners don’t get the smart thing too much, even if we also happen to write for a living. My good friend and colleague Roy Blount, Jr., says folks are forever telling him stuff like, “Well, of course you’re a writer, you’re from the South, you people are natural storytellers.” It irritates him. I know how he feels. When the cocktail hour rolls around, my hosts invariably assume that my DNA requires a big slug of bourbon. I drink Scotch. So as generalities go, I have to say that I think I’d prefer being automatically characterized as a natural-born sharp-as-a-tack type rather than a yarn-spinning, corn-pone-munching bourbon swiller who, while we’re at it, cannot dance. (And who might just also be the sort of person traditionally and regionally inclined to stereotype people of other races and ethnicities.)
The question arose in August 2015 when the first ever Dragon Boat Festival was held in my hometown of Greenville, Mississippi. In China, the festival is an actual national holiday. But it has since been co-opted by cities across America, especially by those like Greenville that are located on a body of water on which dragon boat teams can race. John Cox III, our stalwart former mayor, had been pushing for the festival ever since taking office two years earlier, as a way to honor the contributions Chinese Americans have made to our local culture. This makes more sense than it might seem. Mississippi has long been home to more Chinese Americans than any other state in the South, and when I was growing up, more than 90 percent of them were in the Mississippi Delta.
The first immigrants turned up around 1870 directly from Sze Yap, in southern China, as recruits of white planters, who we
re hedging their bets with replacement labor, lest the newly freed slave population take their emancipation a little too seriously. Others made their way east from California while building the transcontinental railroad, and they stuck around to help build the levees. Either way, upon arrival they were not much interested in field labor—or in the rudimentary shacks built to house them. In what might be described as an early sharp-witted move, they turned instead to the grocery store trade, establishing themselves in African-American neighborhoods, catering to a population who had until recently been “paid” in goods like flour or cornmeal from the plantation commissary and who now had (a little) cash to buy their own groceries.
During my childhood, there were still well over a dozen Chinese stores in town—including Min Sang, Toi Roi, Bing’s, Ting’s, and Joe Gow Nue Nos. 1 and 2—as well as an enormous and enormously popular Chinese restaurant called How Joy. These days, a lot of the population has left the Delta for other parts of the state or beyond (two of my classmates, for example, went off to Stanford and MIT), but lots of folks came back for the festival, which included a delicious six-course banquet the night before the race.
Anyway, I was all for honoring the Chinese and supporting the mayor, and I happened to be home when Howard Brent, the father of my lifelong friend Jessica and one of my personal heroes, said he would sponsor a team if we would get one together. So we gathered a group, named ourselves the Drag Queens, and assembled racing uniforms consisting of hot pink wigs, dangling earrings, and various other accessories including sequined berets and flower-bedecked headbands for the men and women alike. Our theme also enabled me to put to use the leopard-print bra headpiece I made myself when I rode in the Mardi Gras Muses parade, a topper that would be the envy of any real live drag queen—and one so fetching that none other than my former Vogue colleague André Leon Talley suggested I wear it to a luncheon at Manhattan’s La Grenouille.
