Wasted Year: The Last Hippies of Ole Miss

by Douglas Gray

  And now a second surprise. Instead of Dr. French delivering the preliminaries, Amy Madigan crosses the stage and steps to the podium to eulogize and welcome “my dear friend, Edward Alcott.”

  Amy either doesn’t hear or pretends not to notice the titter of laughter that’s mixed with the applause as Alcott enters and she takes her seat in the left corner of the stage.

  “My, she has gotten bold, hasn’t she?” Dr. Goodleigh asks under her breath.

  “She’s got nothing to lose at this point.”

  Alcott’s let his hair grow out over the course of his stay here, and somehow he’s managed to poof it out on top into sort of a graying crest that makes him look like an aging, overstuffed bantam.

  In lieu of the lecture he had planned for today on “The Future of Literature,” Alcott announces that he’s decided to treat us to a chapter from his novel-in-progress, which (he adds) marks a radical departure from his previous work in that instead of historical fiction about past wars, this one is set in contemporary times, the war in Vietnam.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have come,” I grouse.

  The prose is various shades of Tyrian purple, and the storyline a goulash of patriotic clichés involving a young volunteer name Skipper on his first day of jungle patrols with his platoon. Skipper’s plagued with doubts about whether he will prove heroic or turn coward when he first meets the enemy, and he’s quickly put to the test during a pitched battle with the Vietcong. The chapter ends with Skipper cut off from his platoon and running for his life into the brush.

  I think I’ve read this story before.

  “Did Alcott just plagiarize Stephen Crane?” I ask Goodleigh over the thunderous applause that follows the closing line of the chapter.

  Alcott delivers his finest maestro bow as Amy leaps to his side to lead us in a standing ovation of his singular genius. Then, once the applause has begun to subside, she invites questions from the audience, taking care in who she recognizes among us, avoiding a repeat of whatever unpleasantness occurred after last month’s movie.

  The questions, mostly from grad students and faculty, are uniformly safe and fawning, drawing out Alcott’s most noble sentiments about morality, patriotism, self-sacrifice, God-fearing devotion to home and country, and the glories of spreading democracy to the savage nations of this world. He’s feeling in control of the audience by this point, in charge, cocky, and he begins selecting the audience members himself, stepping out from behind the shield the department has cleverly erected for him. Ten minutes or so into the session, he welcomes a question from the hippie gallery in the second row, as one of the boys from Taylor Avenue rises.

  “You’ve been speaking about democracy,” the kid says. “Now I’m just a simple country boy, but I’d like to know – who was it that set up this system, this supposedly democratic system, where we’re always voting for the lesser of two evils? Was George Washington the lesser of two evils? Sometimes I wonder. Some politicians say we’ve got to stop violence in this country, while they’re spending $15,000 a second snuffing gooks.”

  The hippie contingent around him has risen – Becky and Clamor among them – and linked arms, and are now swaying and humming a melody I recognize as the Fugs’ “Wide, Wide River.”

  Amy apparently recognizes it, too, because she’s immediately by Alcott’s side to take control of the microphone. “All right, sit down. Sit down! Stop this right now. There will be no disruptions. I mean it.”

  The humming turns to singing, the lyrics about the wide, wide river of shit clear and inspiring.

  I’ve been traveling on this river of shit

  More than 20 years, and I’m getting tired of it.

  Don’t like swimming, hope it will run dry.

  Got to keep on swimming, ‘cause I don’t want to die.

  More rabble-rousers apparently planted throughout the auditorium rise to join the chorus. Dr. French and Dean Moriarty hustle Alcott off stage. Amy continues her effort to silence the crowd. Moriarty returns and glares at the spectacle.

  “I guess I have nothing left to lose either,” I remark to Dr. Goodleigh.

  I rise, place my hand over my heart, and join the song.

  “Roll on, you mighty river! Roll on.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Wednesday, May 10

  “Are you sure that cat’s not dead?” Blake asks. “Because it really smells like it’s dead.”

  He’s at the kitchen table, behind his typewriter. Joan and I are playing a game of checkers on the couch. The windows are open to welcome in a little cool air after the sun’s been hammering on the trailer roof all day.

  “It always smells dead,” I say.

  “No harm in checking. We may get lucky.” Blake rises, steps over to Flop’s spot on the floor, and nudges the cat with his toe. “Hey, cat,” he says. No response. Blake gets down on one knee and prods her side with an index finger.

  At this, Flop wakes, rolls over and hisses at him – her latest endearing habit. The smell is awful, reaching Joan and me all the way across the room.

  Blake is enraged. This long stretch of sobriety has rendered him short-tempered. “That’s it!” he proclaims. He snatches Flop into the air by the scruff of her neck and thrusts his face into hers. “Sinner in the hands of an angry god!”

  Flop hisses again.

  “What are you going to do?” Joan asks.

  “I’m going to defenestrate this little bugger!” he decides, and starts for the window.

  “Blake, honey, stop,” Joan pleads. “It’s just a poor dumb animal.”

  She’s in the middle of her intercession on Flop’s behalf when a bullet shatters the kitchen window. Joan dives for the floor, pulling me down beside her, but Blake remains standing in the middle of the room, Flop still dangling from his hand. A second and a third bullet whiz past him and strike the wall on the other side of the trailer.

  Blake sets the cat carefully down. Flop hisses at him, rolls over and seems to fall instantly asleep. “Goddamn stupid bastards!” he shouts. “Not again!”

  Faster than I’ve ever seen him move before, Blake has lunged through the door and into the night. Joan calls after him to stop. A moment later we hear his voice outside.

  “Stop shooting at my trailer, idiots! It’s not a dog!”

  By the time Joan and I have persuaded ourselves that it’s safe to get off the floor, Mr. Duck has arrived on the scene, followed shortly by the Widow Woman and Septic System Man. Blake is raving about the homicidal maniacs and incompetent marksmen of Lafayette County as they try to calm him down.

  “Everybody okay in here?” the Widow asks, entering to check on us.

  We assure her that we’re unwounded. The Widow quickly surveys the scene. “Joan honey, you got a pair of tweezers I can use?”

  After a few moments of surgical extraction, the Widow digs one of the bullets from the wall and holds it under the lamp for a closer look. By this point, Mr. Duck has coaxed Blake back inside. She passes the bullet to Duck, and the two consult over it in a specialized jargon of ballistics experts.

  “Hmmmm?” she inquires.

  “Ummm,” he agrees.

  “Ummm-hmmm.”

  “Well, boys,” Duck says. “I don’t know who’s opened fire on you here tonight, but it wasn’t none of us.”

  “Wasn’t?” I ask.

  “Wrong caliber,” he says, handing me a chunk of metal, as if I were able to divine some sort of intelligence from it. “Nobody in the court could’ve done it. Probably just some locals out drunk and cavorting. Dark of the moon tonight, you know. Drives us backwoods folk crazy.”

  “You’re lying,” Blake says.

  An instantaneous, chilly silence falls over us.

  “Beg your pardon?” Mr. Duck replies.

  “You’re lying. You’re just saying that so you can charge us for the damages.”

  “Nobody’s charging anybody anything. I’ll make the repairs. You boys aren’t liable for this.”

  “The last time this happen
ed, it was that high school janitor who lived in trailer four,” Blake says.

  “Yes, but he’s gone now. Don’t you recall?” Duck asks. “I kicked his sorry ass out for that shenanigan.”

  “Blake, honey, calm down” Joan tries to intervene, but Blake is flushed and shaking.

  “I demand a refund of this month’s rent,” he says.

  “What?”

  “If you can’t keep your tenants safe from being fired upon, possibly maimed or even killed. . . .”

  “That bullet couldn’t have killed you.”

  “. . . then you have no business charging rent. I demand a refund, unless you’d care for me to contact the sheriff’s office.”

  “Blake, stop,” Joan urges.

  Duck scratches his jaw, then glances at me. “That how you feel?” I shake my head, no. “Very well,” he says to Blake. “Drop by in the morning. I’ll give you cash.”

  Blake returns to his chair at the kitchen table and recommences his typing, striking the keys with intense concentration. Our guests depart. Joan and I look at each other. She retreats to the back bedroom. I pick up my wallet and my car keys and leave the trailer.

  The Widow Woman’s door is open. She’s sitting on a lawn chair in the yard, smoking a Virginia Slim. I start to apologize for Blake’s behavior, but she waves me off.

  “I’m afraid that boy’s showing his true nature. I’ve known enough former drunks to understand what’s happening to him. Try to reform a good-natured dipso, and more times than not you reveal the bastard beneath. Where are you off to?”

  “Guess I’ll see what’s happening on campus.”

  “Probably a lot. Something’s stirring tonight. Something psychic.” She pauses, deliberating. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t seem especially rattled over what happened tonight.”

  I decide not to reply to this observation directly. “Do me a favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “Just quietly ask around the court, see if anybody noticed a green Cadillac out here tonight.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Thursday, May 11

  The Widow is right. The clock on the courthouse reads 1:20 in the morning, but the Square is full of people walking the sidewalks, staring into display windows. Groups of old men are busy over checker boards at the benches. I spot Sheriff Claprood circling round and round in his squad car.

  The Rebel Buddha’s still open, and a few cars wait their turn for service in the drive-through lane, though the dining room is empty except for Dr. Hirsch, the beauteous Bella, and Ho, who flips me off when she notices my face peering in through the plate glass window.

  I pass silent families sitting on their front porches during my stroll down University Avenue. Students are out in every corner of the Grove, half of them coeds out long past their curfew, but I find my favorite oak unoccupied. I sit zazen, position my mind in hara, then open myself to the moment, struggling for emptiness but betraying my efforts with a secret wish for another vision of Melissa.

  What I find instead, eventually, is sleep, a dream of walking on a pier into what seems to be the Gulf of Mexico, and discovering a fork along the path, a choice between two crossings over an infinite stretch of sea.

  I wake to an old familiar kiss. A wet, sloppy kiss, hot breath tinged with a raw, wild scent in my face. It’s Citizen. I’d know him anywhere, even in almost pitch dark. I throw my arms around his neck, wrestle him down to the ground, and we roll over the bumpy root structure of the oak, tussling and playing like kids.

  “Figure I ought to wake you,” a voice says. “It’s about to happen.”

  I release Citizen, rise to crouch on my knees, and discover the silhouette of the Ranger looming over me against a sky that seems to be brightening. It must be a little before dawn. I’ve been asleep for hours.

  “What’s about to happen?” I ask.

  But the Ranger makes an impatient gesture for silence, and lifts his face to the sky. Citizen sits, expectantly, and throws his big head back, ears and nose at the ready.

  Then I smell it – an invisible, intangible cloud of something sharp, pungent, a heady sweetness, like peppermint or wintergreen filling both outer and inner space.

  Then I hear it – the sound of a child crying, loud, everywhere and nowhere at once, but filling the Grove, filling the town, filling the entire county. I have no doubt that everyone in Oxford, no matter where they are, if they’re awake, are hearing what Citizen, the Ranger and I are hearing at this moment.

  And it goes on and on. The sobbing, inconsolable, of a child with a broken heart, mourning, grieving, lamenting some loss, some betrayal, some disappointed wish. I want to do something. I want to find that child, take it in my arms, soothe it, console it, try to help it find what it’s lost. My heart is breaking along with it.

  As suddenly as the phenomenon started, it ends. The crying stops. The smell is gone. The Ranger whistles to Citizen, who leaps to follow as he strides off across the Grove, on to whatever mysterious business he’s about here.

  “What was that?” I call after him.

  “A puzzle,” he answers over his shoulder, without breaking stride. “I’ve been hearing it near every spring around these parts for the last 30 years. You figure it out, let me know.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Friday, May 12

  “They did it all by themselves,” Garrett tells me, referring to the new Tyler Avenue boys organizing the protest at the end of Alcott’s reading on Tuesday. “Wasn’t that cute? I’m so proud of them!”

  “A feat worthy of the Earth gang back in ’69,” I agree.

  “A grand year,” Garrett says, passing the joint to me.

  “’69 was the golden age.”

  Rose shoots me a sour look. She’s sitting cross-legged with us on the waterbed in the Ohm, her checkered miniskirt exposing a glorious amount of skin, and at first I fear this glance means that she’s caught me peeking again.

  But instead she simply exhales and complains. “Oh, please, just listen to you two. You sound like a couple of old geezers sentimentalizing about your glory days.”

  “It’s hard not to think, sometimes, that our best years have passed,” Garrett laments.

  This remark exasperates her. “You need to get the hell out of Oxford. Too many memories here, and they’re starting to make you feel like a failure . . . at 22 years old. You need a fresh start. Go to Memphis, accept Miss Fairchild’s offer to launch a free press. Yes, Daniel,” she adds, in response to my failed attempt to conceal my surprise, “I know all about Miss Fairchild. I’m not stupid, in case you were thinking so.”

  This conversation is growing uncomfortable, and the joint is gone. I hop off the bed. “Who’s coming with me?” I ask. “I’ve got to look good for my court date.”

  “You’re on your own with this one,” Garrett says.

  “I’m confident that a grown man can manage to buy a pair of shoes for himself,” Rose adds.

  “Don’t be too sure of it,” I say. “A couple of years ago, I was so stoned I came out of Nielsen’s wearing a pair of Hush Puppies. And I think I might have shoplifted them.”

  My kind doesn’t usually shop at Nielsen’s, so I’m greeted with suspicious glances as I enter the store. The management seems to have rearranged the floor since my last visit. The shoe department isn’t where it used to be – I find myself in lingerie instead and quickly slink out, doing my very best not to look like a deviant. I wind up in the men’s suits department, where I look even more out of place, but I have a sense that I’m on the right path, and suddenly I come upon men’s shoes.

  I’m looking for a pair of loafers – brown or black, it doesn’t matter – something straight enough to allow me entrance into a public building full of reputable citizens, but comfortable and serviceable enough to look blue-collar as well.

  What I’m looking for, though, I cannot seem to find. Nielsen’s shoe collection instead features lines of footwear I’ve never actually seen on anyone’s feet, outside Sly and the Family Sto
ne album covers.

  Platform shoes with six-inch soles. Ankle boots. Brogues. Brothel creepers. Mod riding boots. Patent leather. Saddle leather. Suede. Two-tone combinations (black and white, black and tan, tan and Oxblood, white and Oxblood). Zippers, psychedelic shoelaces, brass buckles.

  I poke around for a few minutes, decide that the purchasing manager has clearly suffered some kind of psychotic personality disorder, and consider other my shoe purchasing options (which come down to either the even more upscale Duvall’s men shop or working-class Fred’s Discount) when a young couple arrives.

  The girl can’t be more than 18 or 19, clearly a local rather than an Ole Miss coed, clean-scrubbed and pretty as a slice of chess pie, without a jot of makeup. Ash blonde, perfect teeth, pony tail. Pink blouse, matching skirt.

  The boy seems to be a few years older, dressed in a white t-shirt and jeans. Sinewy, tanned, tough-looking, and apparently as abashed as I am to be in this fine emporium of the latest fashions. Everything about him screams “vet,” probably no more than a few months out of the service, with at least one tour in Vietnam.

  And everything about the two of them screams “engaged.” She’s likely trying to dress him up to meet the family, extend his wardrobe to make him look like a young man with a promising future. He’s cooperating because he’s a big-hearted lunk who’s head-over-heels in love with her. And who wouldn’t be?

  I eavesdrop as she cajoles him into trying on a pair of tan platform shoes, followed by tri-tone brogues, then suede ankle boots (red, with embroidered orange hearts around the upper). His expression turns to one of deeper despair with each new fashion crime she finds among Nielsen’s inventory of shoes.

  He’s struggling. He loves her in the way that only romantic guys can love, willing in theory to do anything for a girl, but pressured to the point at which he must acknowledge the limitations of his love.

  He finally snaps when presented with a pair of leopard-skin print brothel creepers with pink shoelaces.

  “Awww, honey,” he moans. “Please don’t make me do this anymore. Everything in this store is either for cripples or queers.”