Wasted Year: The Last Hippies of Ole Miss

by Douglas Gray

“I don’t want a monkey!” Cindy yells from the kitchen.

  Andrew emerges from the room, shaking his head. “We’re quite concerned over her, you know. She’s been mooning over little Samuel so, we’re afraid she’s going to start wanting one of her own.”

  “Wanting one?”

  “A baby.”

  “So you thought you’d get her a monkey instead.”

  “Next best thing,” Garrett says.

  “I don’t want a monkey,” Cindy shouts again. “I don’t want a baby, either.”

  “That’s just what she says now,” Andrew confides, under his breath.

  “The signs are all there,” Garrett agrees. “You can tell when a girl is ready to domino.”

  “If you boys buy a monkey,” Cindy shouts, “somebody is going to have to brush its teeth? Who’s going to do that? I’m not!”

  I start to leave, but I’m not fast enough out the door. James is descending the stairs. His beard has grown back, and he’s noticeably thinner than the last time I saw him. I’ve heard he spends all his time upstairs, listening to his shortwave, obsessing over Tamburlaine. His eyes look sunken, hollow.

  “I heard Joan’s boyfriend ran off,” he says to me. “That true?”

  “Freaked out, flipped out and dropped out of sight,” I confirm.

  “How is she holding up?”

  “Not well.”

  “Tell her for me she always did make bad choices in men.”

  “I think she already know that.”

  “Just tell her.”

  “Just kiss my ass,” I say, on my way out the door.

  ~ ~ ~

  Tuesday, June 6

  “Wait! Stop! Right there! There!”

  I slap Clamor’s fingers away from the radio dial. She’s been fiddling with it for the past five miles, trying to find a station, finally summoning up a signal out of Chattanooga, and I’ve just heard what sounds like a familiar voice, dim, under a layer of static . . . saying something about Tamburlaine.

  Clamor starts to object, but I cut her off. “Listen!”

  More static, then the opening bars of “Stairway to Heaven.” The signal’s grown stronger by song’s end. Next comes “Family Affair,” followed by “Oye Como Va,” “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress,” “Instant Karma,” “Smiling Faces,” “Locomotive Breath,” “Love Her Madly,” “Uncle John’s Band,” “Jealous Guy,” “Draggin’ the Line,” “Woodstock,” “Just My Imagination,” “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Respect Yourself,” “Treat Her Like a Lady,” “Morning Has Broken,” “Your Song,” “Black Magic Woman,” and “Southern Man.”

  Finally, the deejay returns and delivers a lengthy, confusing diatribe about wheat shipments to Russia, Nixon, pesticides in the city water supply, the King assassination, nighttime troop movements across the Tennessee border, cryptic messages in the lyrics of “Louie Louie,” experiments in animal cloning, Trotsky and D.B. Cooper, cocaine shipments, contrail sightings from experimental supersonic aircraft fleets, blacklists, cyanide, tectonic plates, laughing gas, Carl Jung, limericks, photosynthesis, the Mormons, constipation, penicillin, ginseng tea, and the movie roles of Brian Keith.

  “This next set goes out – as always – to Tamburlaine,” he says, in abrupt conclusion, and queues up “Mandolin Wind.”

  “That man is seriously messed up,” Joan comments from the back seat of the bus. I didn’t know she was awake.

  We stay tuned in, counting 22 songs in a row, until the signal dies.

  ~ ~ ~

  Wednesday, June 7

  It’s breakfast at Tatyana’s goat farm. The ladies are discussing last night’s baseball scores, with digressions on Johnny Bench, Steve Carlton and Billy Williams. Alice, sitting to my left, asks my opinion of whether Pittsburgh has a chance of winning the east division title.

  Tatyana intervenes. “Daniel,” she announces, “is the only straight man alive who knows absolutely nothing about sports. He’s been that way all his life. We suspect some kind of genetic disorder. But in all other respects, he’s a completely functional male.”

  She means this kindly, I know, but somehow my masculinity – already under threat – feels more bruised than before. The other ladies at the table (in order, clockwise: Patricia, Deb, Alice, Sophia and Grace) stare at me with scarcely concealed wonder, as if questioning what possible use I might be to the world.

  Tatyana – dubbed by Garrett as “America’s most unlikely lesbian” after his visit last spring – presides over us at the head of the table. Joan and Clamor, as guests, have been given permission to sleep in late their first morning on the farm. I, on the other hand, implicitly understand the house rules about rising for breakfast at 5:30 and being at work by 6:00.

  It’s barely light outside, but the goats are up, and hungry. The one called Melanie clatters into the kitchen looking for something to nibble, but Patricia shoos her through the back porch and out into the yard.

  Time to paint the living room. I haul the last of my equipment from the bus, arrange drop cloths and ladders, and get to work. The last person who redecorated this room, whoever it was, painted over wallpaper, leaving visible seams. I’ve just finished sanding those flat when Tatyana takes a break from the field and plops down on a couch to watch me work.

  “Your friend is very beautiful,” she says.

  “Especially when she’s sad,” I reply. “Sometimes we say depressing things to Joan just so we can watch her become even better looking.”

  “I don’t mean Joan. Claire Marie.”

  “Clamor is beautiful?”

  “Of course. All the girls are smitten. Have you slept with her?”

  “She’s in love with James.”

  “Our jailbird,” Tatyana recalls. “What a pain in the ass he was the night he stayed here.”

  “He mistreats her.”

  “Not surprised. You should try to steal her from him. So, who have you been sleeping with?”

  “Nobody much. A girl named Ashley, one of the Tamburlaine seekers, whenever she passes through town. The night before Easter, I accidentally wound up in Amy Madigan’s bed.”

  “A more implausible miracle than the Resurrection itself,” Tatyana remarks. “But then you always did have a soft spot for girls who mistreat you. I remember how your bitch of a next-door neighbor Peggy bullied you all through the second and third grades. But you still had such a crush on her. Just like the one you nurse for Melissa.”

  “Let’s not argue about Melissa. The visit is going so well.”

  “Just saying, how you can invest so much emotion into such an ordinary person amazes me. Makes me a little sad, too.”

  “Grace looks well,” I say.

  “If that’s your way of pointing out that I’ve proven myself equally fallible in matters of the heart,” Tatyana replies, “point taken. She’s come to forgive me for my infidelity, though I know she’ll never trust me the way she did before. Apparently, my karma involves eventually doing penance to everyone I’ve ever gone to bed with.”

  “It’s not your fault. People can’t help falling in love with you.”

  “The nightingales are weeping in the orchards of our mothers,” she recites, “And hearts that we broke long ago have long been breaking others.”

  Good memory. I taught her those lines, a night almost exactly two years ago in this very room, after one of her many breakups.

  I finish the stanza. “Tears are round, the sea is deep. Roll them overboard, and sleep.”

  She rises, languid, from the couch, lifts her sun hat from the coffee table, and turns to leave. “Having all these goats around tricks me into thinking we’re in Arcadia, instead of Cary, North Carolina. I think I could spend the entire day talking about love. But there’s work to be done. You should sleep with Claire Marie,” she adds on the way out. “She’d be good for you.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Thursday, June 8

  Tatyana’s farm has 85 goats that produce over 50 gallons of milk each day. The ladies sell some of it — raw, prob
ably in violation of state health laws — to locals, or barter for exchange of services. The rest they turn into cheese and sell under the brand name “Inanna.” The package logo feature a star with eight points.

  At 3:00 I take a break from painting and amble about the farm. Patricia has rigged a series of loudspeakers outside since my last visit, so that whatever’s playing on the stereo or the radio is broadcast to most of the farm. Usually it’s classical music, which Tatyana believes mellows goatish temperaments and yields sweeter milk.

  Today, however, a play-by-play of a game between the Astros and the Phillies is on. The announcer’s patter, the flat Midwest accent all these sportscasters seem to have, the cracking of bats with each hit and the noise of the crowd remind me of summer afternoons on the way to the movie theater in Pass Christian, when the childhood versions of Tatyana and myself walked past the firehouse that seemed to have a perpetual baseball game playing inside the station, while the firemen sat on wooden folding chairs in the shade of the engine and played cards.

  I stop to peek into the door of the kitchen, where Alice is teaching Joan the finer points of making the cheese. But I know better than to enter — the kitchen is kept immaculate, and I’m dirty from a day’s painting. I pass the barn and the pens, on out to the fields where, after a short search, I find Clamor amid a pack of border collies overlooking the hillside where the goats have been herded to graze.

  She sits cross-legged in tall grass, so focused on the charcoal and the sketch pad in her hands that she doesn’t hear my approach. As my shadow passes over the grass and she finally senses my presence, Clamor glances up at me with a guilty expression of having been caught red-handed — not over the sketch pad, since there’s nothing at all amiss with a shepherdess engaging in art. No, it’s over the grease-stained bag beside her and the remnants of a discarded pickle and a gnawed hamburger bun in the grass.

  “So,” I say, “this is why you took the bus into town earlier.”

  “Durham has one of those McDonalds hamburger places,” she says.

  “There was one in Charlottesville, too,” I say. “But I never tried it. Any good?”

  “Tastes like ground shit. But at least it’s meat.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s anything left? Well, be sure to burn that bag. It’s evidence. Tatyana would send you packing if she knew you’d been violating her dietary restrictions. May I see?” I ask, gesturing at the sketchbook.

  It’s a landscape of the hill, the goats and the collies, uncharacteristic of Clamor’s work I’ve seen before. Her drawings tend toward abstract shapes and jarring lines.

  “Country life is mellowing you,” I observe. “Maybe you should ask to stay on, to see how it might influence you as an artist.”

  “I’ve already been invited,” Clamor says. “But I’d miss meat.”

  “And by ‘meat’ you mean . . . .”

  “You know very well what I mean. Not that I have anything against women, mind you. Like most girls, I’ve experimented. Lots of fun, but that’s not where my heart wishes to lead.”

  “Still pining after James,” I say, “even though he’s treated you like shit.”

  “You know,” Clamor says, appearing at first to change the subject, “when I was out here yesterday with Deb and Sophia, and they were showing me around the different fields, they kept talking about a place called Ache Ridge. ‘Ache Ridge, Ache Ridge,’ they kept repeating the name. I was looking all over for this spot on the farm with this haunting, romantic name of Ache Ridge. Then I finally realized they were actually saying ‘acreage,’ and that there really no single place with that name.”

  The collies take a sudden start at something only they can sense, and begin circling the goats, nipping at their heels and forcing them into a tighter grouping. Clamor takes up the sketchbook and begins adding details to the scene she’s created.

  “We all live on Ache Ridge, except it’s in the heart. For me, it’s the place where James is. For you, it’s wherever Melissa may be . . . or Becky or Cindy or that chick Ashley, or whoever you’re secretly pining for.”

  “Most of the time,” I admit, “I don’t even know, myself.”

  “Of course, you don’t know yourself. That’s because you’re not as advanced as I am.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Friday, June 9

  I duck into the men’s yurt before supper, rinse my face in clean water, dust some baby powder under my pits, change my t-shirt and slip into a pair of unstained jeans. I’ve spent the day painting the dining room. It’s unusable for tonight’s meal, so the ladies have arranged a picnic, with a bonfire.

  Deb and Sophia are grilling salmon with teriyaki and asparagus, Patricia’s baked a loaf of seven-grain bread, Grace is slicing watermelon. Joan and Tatyana have returned from Durham with several jugs of Chianti in fiasci, and Clamor is shaking the hell out of a tambourine she discovered somewhere, already drunk.

  We delay setting the bonfire until nightfall starts. I have no idea what the hour is. I’m lying back in a bed of dried pine needles, watching flames embrace in the space between a clearing of tree branches, my belly full with food and wine, perfectly happy, perfectly content to be here in this moment with these ladies.

  And wishing, a little, that I’d been born a girl. If I had, I could stay here forever at the goat farm. The way I feel about women, I could be the best damn lesbian ever.

  I’m pondering this thought and watching embers hurl themselves from the flames into the blackness, when the play-by-play of tonight’s game (Dodgers vs. the Pirates) is abruptly shut off, and the opening chords of “Monday, Monday” reach us from a nearby outdoor speaker. Tatyana’s put the first Mamas and Papas album on the turntable. I haven’t heard it, or even thought about it, in years.

  “We’ve been listening to sports all day,” Tatyana proclaims, in response to objections from the others when she returns to the fire. “We’re going to have some music now.”

  The first cut ends, followed by “Straight Shooter,” “Got a Feelin’,” and “I Call Your Name.” By the time their rendition of “Do You Wanna Dance” starts, I’m on my feet and find Tatyana facing me a few yards away, on the edge of the fire.

  It’s our song, from way back in 1966. All those years ago. I bow. Tatyana curtsies. We dance slow and dreamy and close.

  Tatyana smells wonderful, a heady combination of Prell shampoo, watermelon, Chianti and goat cheese.

  I’m aware, too, of eyes watching us. The eyes of my friends. The eyes of Tatyana’s partners. The eyes of the goats watching from behind the wire fences of their pens.

  The song ends, and the final cut of side one, “Go Where You Wanna Go,” begins. There’s a hesitant silence from our audience, finally broken by Clamor.

  “You two have danced before!”

  “Sophomore prom, junior prom, and senior prom,” Tatyana says. “The Pass Christian school board was very big on dancing. Balls were supposed to prepare us for our roles in polite southern society.”

  “And you see how well that plan worked,” I add.

  “To be fair,” Tatyana says, “we were already lost causes by then — you with your anarchistic sympathies, me with my unwholesome affections. If the both of us hadn’t fled that town as soon as we were able, we would have been driven out anyway.”

  “Lucky for us the world is a big place.”

  “Bigger than some have the opportunity to experience,” Tatyana says. “Did you realize that your friends have never seen the ocean?”

  I turn to Joan and Clamor, sitting side by side at the picnic table. Two shakes of the head. Somehow, this doesn’t surprise me about Clamor. But Joan — I always imagined her to be worldly and well-traveled.

  “This is a gap in their experience I’m determined to rectify. Tomorrow, when we go into town for the market, we’ll buy bathing suits for both of them. Sunday, we’re driving to Topsail. I’ve already rented a cabin.”

  “Topsail?” I ask. “I’m not sure I can ever go back to Topsail.”
r />   “Of course you can. Don’t be a sissy.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Saturday, June 10

  I’m constantly amazed at how early farmers get up. My alarm woke me at 4:00 this morning to a breakfast of coffee and oatmeal, followed by a half hour loading of the farm’s two pickups, and the drive into town.

  It’s just after 6:00 when we reach the farmers market in Durham, but we’re among the last to arrive. The fairground is already teeming with vendors selling blueberries, leeks, eggs, early corn, flowers, cabbage, beeswax, zucchini, jams, cherries, biscuits, spinach, red velvet cakes, onions, kale, sweet peppers, fruit pies of every imaginable variety, eggplant, raw milk, asparagus, fudge, butter, preserves, nectarines, cheese, scallions, honey, basil, lettuce, chard, summer squash, candles, pigs feet, honey dew, peaches, carrots, radishes, collards, green beans, herb tinctures, snap peas, cucumbers, live chickens, and green onions.

  It doesn’t matter so much if we’re latecomers, though, since Tatyana’s farm is the only local supplier of goat cheese and goat milk. She has the market cornered. We need five trips to carry the products from the parking lot to their usual booth. Tatyana has brought Sophia and Deb with her for this morning’s sale, leaving the others behind to mind the chores. I’ve driven the bus in, with Joan and Clamor asleep in the back. When I check on them at 8:30, they’re still curled up in the sleeping bags we packed for the trip.

  Business is brisk for the first few hours, but begins to taper off around 10:00. By this point, though, all the milk is gone and the cheese has been pretty thoroughly picked through. Tatyana, Deb and Sophia take a break to do some marketing for the farm, leaving me in charge of the booth. It seems not too daunting a task.

  I’m reading Herodotus when two men in jeans and work shirts approach. Not customers, it would seem.

  “You don’t look much like a Sophist to me,” the taller one says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You can’t be a Sophist, now can you?”

  “No, I’ve always considered myself more of an Aristotelian.”

  “Fred, I keep telling you,” his companion says, “the word is Sapphic. Not Sophist.”

  “Oh, pardon my pronunciation, then,” Fred says. “Sapphic. I guess the question is whether he also likes women better than he likes men.”

  “I must confess to being a big fan of the ladies,” I admit.

  “Me, too,” Fred agrees. “Guess that kind of makes all three of us Sapphics, don’t it? Not that I claim to understand women being with women, but it takes all kinds.”