Wasted Year: The Last Hippies of Ole Miss

by Douglas Gray

  “Well, boy, I guess your side won today,” he says when I join them. “And before you ask, I’m out of uniform because I’m no longer on the force. Resigned, effective immediately.”

  I express my condolences, and surprise myself by actually feeling an inkling of sympathy for the man.

  “I appreciate the kindness, boy,” he replies. “But don’t weep no tears for me. I’m devoted all my life to the law, but if that means protecting the rights of Satan lovers, then I’m clearly in the wrong line of work.”

  “So what will you do now?”

  “Start bringing Lafayette County back to the Lord,” he says.

  Part 7. Revelation

  March 1 - April 2, 1972

  Wednesday, March 1

  Oxford’s fourteen days of continuous rainfall have ended. I wake on the couch at Tyler, in the parlor turned squalid from last night’s celebration. Clamor is free and asleep on my pallet upstairs. It was a great party. Everyone came, even Sheriff Claprood.

  I stumble toward the kitchen to find Garrett stirring up a cup of Tasters Choice.

  “Try not to be frightened,” he warns.

  “Frightened of what?”

  “There’s a great ball of fire, outside, hanging in the sky. Don’t worry. I’ve spoken with the village elders, and they assure me that people used to see it all the time. They call it the ‘Sun.’”

  “The Sun,” I repeat. “We live in an age of wonders.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Thursday, March 2

  The sun is out, the scent of an early spring is in the air, and the Flasher has struck again, this time on Sorority Row outside the Kappa Kappa Gamma house.

  I drop in at the Sociology office on my way to the Museum, hoping to establish an alibi for Hirsch.

  “You again,” Mrs. Arnett complains as I close the door behind me. “Still looking for that girl? What was her name? Melissa?”

  “Not today.”

  “Good. Because I haven’t seen her.”

  Hirsch’s door is closed and the office is dark behind the clouded glass panel. “Has he been in?” I ask.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Guess I do.”

  “First the sheriff comes looking for him, now you,” she grumbles. “The man hasn’t had so many callers in years. Most folks try to avoid him.”

  “What did Sheriff Claprood want Dr. Hirsch for?” As if I don’t already know.

  “The sheriff,” Mrs. Arnett replies, “is starting an Oxford chapter of the Hare Krishna. He dropped by to ask if Dr. Hirsch wants to shave his head and shake a tambourine.”

  “He didn’t say that.”

  “Likely not. I don’t know what he said. I wasn’t listening. And I’m not listening to you any longer, either.”

  “Your little friend dropped by, with more poetry,” Dr. Goodleigh says when I return to the Museum. “I was worried that the torch she’s carrying for you was going to set off the fire alarm.”

  I set my books beside the typewriter and open the folder that Becky’s left. “She’s a sweet kid.”

  “Not a kid at all. She’s 19, a National Merit Scholar, and very mature for her age. She just happens to look childlike.”

  “She’s still younger than me.”

  “You’re just 23. Four years isn’t exactly robbing the cradle. She’s got her first college crush. I know you can remember what that’s like. Give her a thrill and ask her out.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Friday, March 3

  “Dean Moriarty wants to see me in his office?” I ask after reading the phone message Dr. Goodleigh hands me. “How exciting. Will Sal Paradise be there, too?”

  “Not that Dean Moriarty.”

  It’s been quite a while since I last had official business in the Lyceum, and I can’t say that I’ve missed the place. But the Dean’s carefully worded invitation to a 1:00 p.m. conversation in his office is too intriguing to ignore.

  His receptionist passes a critical eye over me, but remains polite enough to offer me coffee (which I politely decline) before ushering me into the office, where I discover Dr. Evans already sitting at a conference table overlooking a panorama of University Circle.

  Dr. Moriarty has risen in the world since the days during my freshman year when he took the stage at Fulton Chapel each Thursday morning to deliver three hours of Botany lectures to a class of 600 students.

  “I’ve asked you gentlemen here today,” Moriarty begins, “because I’m sure you’re as eager as I am to avoid going to court over this misunderstanding.”

  “We are, indeed,” Dr. Evans agrees. “Just release the magazine, and we’ll be happy to drop the suit.”

  “I’m not authorized to do that. However, I’ve devised a compromise that I believe will satisfy everyone’s concerns. I propose convening a committee of senior faculty, to determine whether or not the story in question is obscene, and whether or not the magazine may be released.”

  “A committee. Who’s going to appoint it?”

  “I will,” Moriarty says. “I’ve already taken the liberty of enlisting faculty from Pharmacy, Mathematics, Biology, Physics and Civil Engineering.”

  “Sounds like an odd group to be judging literary merit,” Dr. Evans says.

  “That’s the beauty of my selection. None of the committee will have any knowledge or interest in whether there’s any redeeming literary merit to the publication. They can reach an impartial decision.”

  “In other words, we can trust them because they’ll be too ill-informed to know what they’re doing.”

  “Exactly. Of course, the evaluation will need to include aesthetic considerations, and that’s why I’ve decided the committee will be chaired by an eminent literary figure.”

  My already sinking feeling sinks a little lower.

  “If you mean Edward Alcott,” Dr. Evans replies, “he’s totally unacceptable. He’ll steer your committee to a foregone conclusion.”

  Dean Moriarty frowns. “I’d advise against making prejudicial statements, Harold. Dr. French has already agreed, on behalf of your department, to abide by the committee’s decision. We’ll inform you as soon as we know what it is.”

  Moriarty rises from his chair. This meeting is over.

  “I hope that you, as a gentleman, will cooperate,” he says to Dr. Evans. “It would be best for everyone.”

  “I’m a gentleman, Don,” Dr. Evans replies. “I’m not a fool. Don’t suppose for a minute that this is the end of anything.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Saturday, March 4

  I find Citizen sunning himself on the front porch of the Tyler house, and we stroll together toward the Square. Dottie has John Lee Hooker on the stereo, “Never Get out of These Blues Alive,” when we reach the Nickelodeon.

  “I miss Ho,” she complains. “She would have loved this album.”

  “She’s just around the corner.”

  “She might as well be back in China, for all I get to see her. Those boys keep her working in the kitchen from sunup to midnight, and they’ve moved her out of the Lyric, made a little room for her in a utility closet right there in the Buddha. I suppose she’s happy enough, as long as she has some recreational hash, but it’s not the same. Who’s your friend?”

  “You can see him, too? Listen, be sure to tell Garrett. He thinks this dog is all in my head.”

  “Why would he think that?”

  “A little misunderstanding from the first night we saw him,” I explain.” Garrett and I were dropping acid down at the old depot one night a few years back, when this dog came wandering out of the kudzu. Garrett was so messed up, he thought it was a pig. He wanted to dig a pit by the tracks and roast him, have a big luau like Tahitians.

  “Later, when we headed back to the Earth, the dog followed. Garrett started getting paranoid. ‘That pig is following us, man. What does that pig want?’ When we got to the front door, he made a big scene, started shouting loud as he could, ‘Don’t let that pig in the house! Keep that pig outta here!’

>   “Naturally, everybody inside thought there were cops at the door. A big commotion ensued, everybody in the Earth stumbling onto the porch to keep the cops out. The dog got spooked and ran off. Ever after that, people debated over whether it had been a dog, a pig, or a cop following us that night. For some reason, the consensus was that it must have been an actual pig, as if that made the most sense. Citizen came back to visit me lots of times afterward, but never when anyone else was around, so none of them ever saw him.”

  “Did any of that really happen?” Dottie asks me after I’m done.

  “I’m not sure. But I seem to recollect that it did.”

  “Well, be that as it may. Speaking of the cops, don’t let anybody talk you into signing any petition. Petition-takers are all over the Square today, gathering signatures. Two of ‘em came in an hour ago, and I politely invited them to remove their asses from my store.”

  “What’s the petition about?”

  “Recall election,” she says. “They’re trying to replace Claprood.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Sunday, March 5

  “Are you boys residents of Lafayette County?” the petition taker asks, squirming his way toward us through the crowd at Skeeter’s.

  It’s only 2:30 in the afternoon, but Blake’s favorite Holly Springs honky-tonk is already packed, mostly with frat boys and blue collars from Oxford.

  “Don’t sign that,” I warn Blake.

  “What is it?” he asks, slurring the question.

  “Petition to get beer back in Oxford,” the man answers.

  “Petition to get Claprood recalled,” I counter.

  “Same thing.”

  “The hell it is. You’re trying to railroad what may be the only honest sheriff in the entire state out of office. If you want beer legal in Oxford, why not organize another referendum? The last one nearly passed.”

  “You hippies just love this sheriff, don’t you? He lets you smoke all the dope you want, while keeping honest citizens from having just a little sip of beer. He must be a deviant himself. I hear he even served cookies and Coca Colas to those witches when they were arrested, and refused to let ‘em be locked in a cell.”

  “Witches!” Blake shouts. “Don’t try telling me about witches! I’ve had to live with a witch!”

  “I’m living with one right now,” the man answers, “and she gets especially temperamental when she can’t drink beer.”

  I signal the bartender, and inform him that the man is collecting signatures for the recall election. The bouncer ejects him. Clapwood’s prohibition measures have been a windfall for the Holly Springs taverns. He’s quite popular up here.

  A table by the window opens up and I steer Blake toward it. He’s not going to be able to stay on his feet for much longer. He lands with a plop in the chair, spilling froth on his jacket, still ranting about witches.

  “Spells. Incense. Burning all sorts of weird plants. Mandrake roots. Incantations. Ouija boards – let me tell you about the Ouija boards.” He reaches across the table, and seizes my wrist. “Ouija boards are scary shit. No kidding. One night, they decided to contact Jimi Hendrix on one of those things. Can you believe it – Jimi fucking Hendrix? What’s even scarier, I think they actually reached him, and he was pissed off! Bunch of damn silly white girls disturbing him like that. Things started flying all around inside the trailer – cups, books, candles. Tell you what, I’m glad that bitch has moved out.”

  “Raven’s gone? Since when?”

  “Day after the trial. She and her coven found a house to rent someplace on Madison.”

  “So you’re there alone.”

  “Until I find a roommate or the Duck kicks me out for not coming up with the rent.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Monday, March 6

  “Told you so,” I say to Becky. “You thought I was pulling your leg.”

  We’ve rendezvoused on the third floor stacks of the library, modern British literature, PR 614. Becky slips the book I’ve promised to show her from its place on the shelf, opens it, and runs a tiny index finger over the title page:

  William Butler Yeats

  The Wanderings of Oisin, and Other Poems

  London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1889

  “I wouldn’t have believed it,” she says. “A first edition of Yeats, just sitting here. It’s like holding a piece of history.”

  “My freshman year, I used to sneak up here looking for rare books. The stacks weren’t open to undergraduates then, and any student caught up here without permission faced academic censure. Breaking into the library was my first taste of civil disobedience, which whetted my appetite for other illegal activities.”

  “What did you find?” she asks.

  “First editions of Faulkner, of course – almost all of his novels. But also rare copies of Frost, Pound, Rossetti, Wharton, H.G. Wells, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Conrad, Dreiser, Stevens, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Henry James, William Carlos Williams. Hell, they even had a first edition of Moby Dick up here, which must have been worth a fortune. I wrote a dozen anonymous letters to the library staff, begging them to put those copies someplace safe, but nobody did anything. Over the years since then, most of them have disappeared. This Yeats is the last I know of.”

  “Come away, O human child!” Becky reads, from “The Lost Child.”

  “To the waters and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand.

  For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”

  “You should check it out,” I suggest. “Sleep with it under your pillow for inspiration. I used to do that with an 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass that used to be up here, whenever I suffered writers block.”

  “Where the wave of moonlight glosses,” she continues.

  “The dim gray sands with light,

  Far off by furthest Rosses

  We foot it all the night,

  Weaving olden dances

  Mingling hands and mingling glances

  Till the moon has taken flight.”

  She leans her head against the wall behind her, lips slightly parted, eyes closed, and presses Yeats to her chest, embracing him.

  “Mingling hands and mingling glances,” she breathes. “Till the moon has taken flight.”

  The air around us turns still. And charged. I can’t tell which of us this rapture has descended upon, her or me. Maybe both. Mysterious duality here. To look at her, Becky could be Yeats’ stolen child. She could be one of his faery. Or both.

  I know only that if ever a girl needed to be kissed – right here, at this moment – it’s her. I think she’s waiting for me to make a move. I might be misreading whatever signal she’s sending, but if I don’t kiss Becky now, I probably never will.

  “Mingling hands and mingling glances,” she repeats, a low murmur. I take a step forward, bend my face toward her, feel the breath she speaks.

  I move in for the kiss. And am interrupted.

  “Attention! Attention! Attention!” a voice on the library intercom blasts.

  Her eyes fly open. I draw back.

  What sounds like an explosion echoes down the narrow stairwell that wends through the center of the building.

  WHAM!

  I know that sound well enough – the fire door on the top floor automatically slamming shut, closing the stairwell.

  WHAM! There goes the fifth floor door.

  WHAM! The fourth floor.

  WHAM! The third floor door, only a few yards from where we stand.

  “Attention!” the intercom howls “The library is in lockdown. I repeat: the library is in lockdown. Please remain where you are. Campus security and library personnel will arrive shortly to escort you from the building. Until then, remain where you are!”

  “What do you think it is?” Becky asks.

  The question gets answered by the sound of feet on the steps, the fire door being thrown open, a welter of grunts and cries rising through the stairwell.

  “Third floor! Third floor!” a voice c
ries, rounding the corner.

  Becky and I dodge into a carrell just moments before a campus cop barrels down our aisle, screaming into a walkie-talkie. “Third floor!”

  We glance out to watch the cop take a left turn into the central hallway. A moment later – silently, stealthily following behind him – appears an old man in a raincoat who’s moving away from us at a tremendous speed.

  The hem of the raincoat billows out behind him, revealing a pair of cut-off trouser legs tied around his knees. Above, we spy the ancient, withered buttocks of the Ole Miss Flasher, outwitting his captors once again.

  ~ ~ ~

  Tuesday, March 7

  The Daily Mississippian’s headline story for today recounts the Flasher’s miraculous escape yesterday from the library. While a crack team of campus cops conducted a search inside, pedestrians outside the building spotted a roly-poly man tripping down the north fire escape, falling down the last flight of steps, and limping away in the direction of Deupree Hall.

  The paper’s update on the Barefoot case is buried on page four, two scant paragraphs quoting Dr. French and Dean Moriarty on the administration’s plan to resolve the dispute swiftly and with proper balance between students’ rights of free speech and the administration’s duty to protect the community from evil-doers bent on shredding the fabric of campus decency, or something to that effect.

  This is the third article the paper that’s appeared on the case, but Dr. Evans and I have yet to be quoted in any of them, or even approached by a reporter.

  I drop by the Ohm just as Garrett is closing shop, to ask whether he has any insight as to the paper’s bias.

  He glances at the byline. “I don’t know the writer. A freshman, most likely. They’ve put Jimmy Olson on the story.”

  “Can you do anything?”

  “I’m not the most popular person over at the Mississippian, you know. A lot of people still hold a grudge about my stint as editor last year.”

  “I understand your editorials upset a few people.”

  “My modest proposals were intended as satire. The problem with this place is that nobody can take a fucking joke.”

  “You proposed that all candidates for homecoming queen undergo a pelvic exam to prove that they’re virgins.”

  “You certainly don’t want a girl of loose morals in that high office.”

  “And that ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ become the new alma mater.”

  “The Chancellor and all the deans would have to harmonize on the ‘Ee-e-e-um-um-a-weh, Ee-e-e-um-um-a-weh’ parts at commencement.”