If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground

by Lewis Grizzard

Mrs. Sarah Jane Skinner, school newspaper sponsor and journalism teacher, said, “I was shocked to learn that Lewis had substituted another column for the one I approved. I will not, and cannot, tolerate such deceit.

  “There is no place in journalism for such, and I will devote the rest of my year to cramming that fact down Lewis’s throat.”

  Coach Albright’s only response was, “After the Monk gets through with him [Grizzard], I’m going to kick the little piss-ant all over Coweta County.”

  Okay, so that never actually appeared in print, but it’s sort of what did happen. What exactly did happen was they took away my job and my title and called my mother, who said to me, “I certainly didn’t raise you this way.”

  Fortunately, Coach Albright was told he couldn’t kick the little piss-ant all over Coweta County because I might get seriously injured during the process, and although I did, in fact, deserve to be seriously injured, it might not look good with the Board of Education, and he already was on thin ice with them for producing such a rotten football team.

  I might have, indeed, been a little piss-ant back then, but at least I was a clever little piss-ant. Camilla Stevens was social editor of Tiger Tracks. What the social editor did was keep up with who was going steady with whom and that sort of thing. One day I said to Camilla, a good friend, “Let me write your column this week.”

  Camilla had a big date with Dudley Stamps coming up on Saturday night and figured she needed the extra time to spend on her hair, so she granted my request.

  I figured I was safe here, because no members of the faculty knew beans about who was going steady with whom and that sort of thing, so I could get away with a lot.

  The lead in the column I wrote for Camilla went, “What’s this? Filbert Fowler and Phyllis Dalyrimple seen holding hands on their way to study hall? Tell me, guys and gals, is this the start of something big?”

  Here was the deal. Filbert Fowler, a Presbyterian minister’s son, was afraid of girls because his father had warned him that any interest in the flesh would stunt his growth and send him straight to hell. Phyllis Dalyrimple, on the other hand, was known to be the loosest girl in school and was rumored to have taken on the entire tenth-grade boys’ shop class in the back of Scooter Williams’s ’54 Chevy.

  To link Filbert Fowler with Phyllis Dalyrimple was maybe the funniest thing my school readers had ever heard of. I had some other gems, too:

  “Can’t mention names, but a certain quarterback is said to have his eye on a certain tenth-grader who sits in the second chair of the first row in fifth period home economics class. . . .”

  The quarterback obviously was Phil Manderson, the best-looking boy in school, and as soon as everybody checked out who sat in the second chair of the first row in fifth-period Home Ec class and discovered it was Linda (the Haint) Cunningham, they broke up.

  The Haint not only was ugly, she was scary. The word was, she could spook an entire Holiday Inn by herself. The Haint had ratty hair, was cross-eyed (when she faced southward, her left eye looked toward Galveston and her right toward Miami), and had zits that could have won prizes for both size and color. Her feet, placed end-to-end, would have stretched from the library halfway to the audiovisual room.

  The only people who were not amused by my linkage of the quarterback and the Haint were the quarterback and Camilla Stevens. (The Haint didn’t read the school paper, or anything else for that matter, because of a large zit that sat on the end of her nose and blocked out her eyes when she looked down to read something.) The quarterback, young Mr. Manderson, was not used to being held up to public ridicule. He quickly tracked down Camilla, whom he thought to be the source of his troubles, and said, “If you weren’t a girl, I’d make you bleed in numerous places.”

  Camilla ratted on me, of course, and told quarterback Manderson who was really to blame for linking him with the Haint. He tracked me down in the hall between second and third period and said, “When school’s out this afternoon, I’m going to kill you.”

  At sixteen, I was about to have to deal with the first of many irate readers to come.

  I did a lot of thinking as I waited to be killed when school was out. Should I offer Phil Manderson money not to kill me? Should I ask for asylum in the principal’s office? Should I move to Wyoming?

  I decided the best path was to go ahead and confront Phil Manderson and attempt to reason with him. That failing, I would take one punch, hit the deck, and pretend to remain unconscious—if I wasn’t actually unconscious—until he got bored with me and left.

  He tracked me down in the parking lot about eight seconds after the three-thirty bell rang.

  “Trying to get away?” he said to me.

  “Listen, Manderson,” I began, beginning the try-to-reason-withhim part of my plan, “at least I spelled your name correctly.”

  He didn’t seem impressed with that fact.

  “Hey, I was just having a little fun,” I went on. “It was a joke. Where’s your sense of humor, man?”

  He hit me in the stomach. I didn’t have to pretend to fall down. I really did fall down because he hit me in the stomach. But I did continue to remain fallen down.

  “Get up!” he ordered.

  I didn’t move. My eyes were closed tightly.

  “Are you okay?” he finally asked. I could sense he was beginning to think he had killed me.

  Still no response.

  “Hey, Monk,” he called to Norman Montgomery. “I think I’ve killed this son of a bitch.”

  “Let’s see,” said Monk, kicking me in the ribs. More pain, but still I remained still.

  “I believe you have killed the son of a bitch,” said Monk, adding, “Let’s go. We’ll be late for practice.”

  “Do you think I’ll get in any trouble if I really did kill him?” Manderson asked the Monk.

  “They might make you sit out a couple of games, but that’s about it,” said the Monk.

  When I was certain they had gone, I got up off the ground, got into my car, and drove home. I was in a great deal of pain, but I knew I had acted correctly. To have attempted to fight back would have resulted in getting hurt even more. Plus, I sensed I had brought at least a smidgen of guilt into Phil Manderson’s life, and I was pleased with that.

  As far as Filbert Fowler and Phyllis Dalyrimple were concerned, they actually did get together before the school year was out. Against his father’s protests, Filbert wound up marrying Phyllis when they were twenty, and both had a long career in porno movies. Filbert produced them, while Phyllis played various starring roles.

  Camilla got over being mad at me eventually, and she now gives me credit for launching her own career in journalism. She later made it to New York, changed her name to Liz Smith, and became a premier gossip columnist.

  I had no more opportunities to practice my craft the rest of my high school days. Oh, I wrote a sonnet here and there, did a Chemistry essay entitled “Halogens: Friend or Foe?” and wrote a magnificent paper on President Chester A. Arthur, but that was it.

  I did, however, have the opportunity to learn something that would benefit me greatly as a professional journalist. I learned to type.

  My basketball coach, Mr. Sheets, taught typing. I’ve seen enough newspaper movies by now (Bogart’s Deadline USA and Jack Webb’s 30 to name a couple), to know you had to be able to type if you wanted to write for a newspaper. Writing things out longhand becomes painful after a time (during the last eight or nine pages of my Chester A. Arthur tome, I developed severe hand cramps), and I didn’t have a particularly attractive handwriting style in the first place.

  Mr. Sheets would not allow the two-finger hunt-and-peck system, so I learned the technique where you put the fingers of your left hand on asdf and the fingers on your right hand on jkl; and went from there. It was surprisingly easy.

  The first thing I could type fast without making an error was: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.” (I didn’t make a mistake just now, nearly thirt
y years later, either.)

  I also learned to compose on a typewriter. A lot of people learn to type so they can get a job typing what other people have written down longhand. I learned to type so I could sit before my typewriter in Sulphur Dell, where the Nashville Vols played, and compose:

  By LEWIS GRIZZARD

  Atlanta Journal Staff Writer

  NASHVILLE, TENN—First baseman Buck Riddle picked the Atlanta Crackers off the canvas here Saturday night with a three-run homer in the top of the 9th inning that hatched a come-from-behind 6–4 Atlanta Cracker victory.

  Of course, Mr. Sheets did insist that I copy a few things on the typewriter and not make any mistakes. He’d give tests in that. I did okay, but I’ve never been the neatest of typers. And, just as I figured it would, it worked out that if you write for a newspaper, you can be as messy as you want to be with your typing. When you make a mistake while writing your story, you can simply crossover the mistake with a bunch of x’s.

  In those days, when you were on the road, you would send your stories back to the newspaper by Western Union, and Western Union sent back every word in all caps, no matter how you typed it. That meant you could type your entire story in lower case, since it would still be sent back in all caps. That saved a lot of time and energy, too.

  By the end of the year, I had composing on a classroom typewriter locked, and my mother found out my Aunt Emily, on my father’s side, had a typewriter that had belonged to her late husband, my Uncle Frank. She called Aunt Emily and asked if I could have it.

  Aunt Emily agreed, as long as we would come over to her house to pick it up. I was reluctant to go, because my Aunt Emily was a little strange. She talked quite fast and had once been a fortune-teller—or witch, I forget which—and I was afraid she would put some sort of hex or curse on me.

  Also, Aunt Emily’s daughter, Cousin Helen, was much younger than I was, but the last time I had seen her, she had kicked me on the shin.

  “Aunt Emily is giving you Uncle Frank’s typewriter, and you should be grateful enough to at least go ride over with me to pick it up,” said my mother.

  “But what if Helen kicks me in the shin?” I asked.

  “You’re afraid of a nine-year-old girl?” my mother asked back.

  I didn’t say anything else and, somewhat ashamed, got into the car. When we arrived at Aunt Emily’s she suggested Helen take me outside to see their new horse. I had no interest whatsoever in seeing a horse, but my mother cut me one of those looks that said, “Get out there with Helen and see that horse. Now.”

  We were looking at the horse, Helen and I, when she snuck behind me and poured a bucket of water she’d found in the stall all over my head. It didn’t just stay on my head, of course; it dripped down on the rest of me.

  I attempted to catch Helen and feed her to the horse, but she ran inside and said, “Mama, make Lewis stop chasing me!” Great, I thought. Not only is my mother going to get mad at me, but here’s where Aunt Emily gives out the curse.

  I did explain why I was chasing Helen, of course, and the fact I was drenched in water from head to foot gave my story a great deal of credibility.

  “You shouldn’t pour water on your cousin,” Aunt Emily said to Helen.

  “Oh, he’ll dry out,” said my mother, thinking, I’m sure, What am I raising here? A young man who can’t deal with a nine-year-old girl cousin?

  Many years later, when I got divorced for the third time, my mother said, “Your troubles with women may have started with your Cousin Helen.”

  I wondered to myself if I had been able to get even with Helen, which I never did, would my marital record perhaps be a brighter one?

  I did get Uncle Frank’s typewriter that day, however, and practiced writing sports stories. I even practiced what I would write if the time came when I had to compose my first professional column:

  Hello, world, for the first time, subjectively,

  I thought it was low-key, yet obviously written by a man who had stored up a lot of things he wanted to say.

  I don’t remember the first line of the first professional column I ever wrote—which would appear years later on the sports page of the Daily News in Athens, Georgia, but I know it wasn’t what I had practiced on my Uncle Frank’s typewriter during high school. Still, I did get around to using the line—right here—which is why my advice to young people who want to be writers is:

  1. First learn to type

  2. Practice writing

  3. Never turn your back on your cousin in a horse stable.

  Chapter 3

  BEFORE MY NEWSPAPER CAREER actually began (like all other careers, a writing career actually begins when you begin getting paid), I spent one morning as a salesman and three months working at a bank. These vocations didn’t last longer because I couldn’t sell anything and because the only way I could have found working at a bank interesting would have been if they allowed me to handle some of the money. Unfortunately, I never saw even one roll of pennies.

  How all this came about is how a lot of things come about. I was in love. King Edward renounced his throne because he was in love. I suppose that was Steve Garvey’s excuse, too. So why not me?

  I was in love with Paula. I fell for her madly in the eighth grade, dated her exclusively throughout high school, and would eventually marry her.

  Love in the sixties was quite different from love in the nineties.

  We didn’t have such things in the sixties as recreational pregnancies or Kim Basinger and Prince. All we did was drive around the Dairy Queen or go to the drive-in and grind our lips together while Rock Hudson was wooing Doris Day. We know all about Rock now, but did you hear the rumor about Doris Day once making it with Wilt Chamberlain?

  My friend Ronnie Jenkins said he read about it in one of those newspapers they sell at the grocery checkout counter. Ronnie was in the grocery store buying wienies. We still had wienie roasts in those days. (There’s a Rock Hudson line in there somewhere, but tempt me not, evil Muse.)

  Paula. She was lovely, tall, and blond, and she wanted to be a model. She decided college would be a complete waste of her time, so upon graduation she took a job in Atlanta at a bank and enrolled in one of those modeling schools where they teach you to walk that way.

  I had been accepted at the University of Georgia, where I would study journalism, beginning in the fall. What to do with the three summer months after my high school graduation, that was the key question.

  After giving it about eleven seconds of thought, I decided to go to Atlanta myself and seek summer employment, thus allowing me to be near my beloved Paula, who, for the first time in her life, would not be near her mother. This had possibilities I had heretofore never dreamed of. Remember, this was 1964. I still had the unused condom I had bought at Steve Smith’s truck stop in 1959.

  My friend Ronnie Jenkins also had found work in an Atlanta bank. The idea was for me to find a job, for Ronnie and me to get an apartment near the apartment Paula and her friend had taken, and for the rest to be the great summer of ’64, especially if we could find somebody of age to buy beer for us.

  Ronnie found a one-bedroom apartment in a duplex on Atlanta’s Sixth Street, which was just showing the signs of becoming a slum. Paula’s place was not far away, perhaps the distance a mugger could make in ten minutes if he was the subject of hot pursuit.

  I began an ardent search for the job. My first stop, obviously, was at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. After college, it was my intention to go to work for one of the papers.

  I realized I wasn’t going to be hired to cover baseball for the summer, but I reasoned that when I told whoever I’d have to talk to of my future intentions, that person would realize it might be wise to go ahead and hire me for the summer so a lot of orientation wouldn’t be necessary when I returned four years later with my journalism degree and the knowledge that would include, such as knowing who invented movable type, Johannes Gutenberg.

  The paper was located at 10 Forsyth Street, next
door to Union Station, which served the L & N Railroad. A few passenger trains still stopped and departed there, the most notable, the Georgian, ran from Atlanta to St. Louis. We are talking the fourth quarter of preAmtrak passenger trains, and Union Station had that forgotten-but-not-gone look to it.

  I asked the security guard at the paper to direct me to the personnel department. I caught an elevator to the third floor. There was a lady at a desk.

  I said, “Hello. My name is Lewis Grizzard, and I’ll be majoring in journalism at Georgia this fall. I’d like to see about a summer job here, since I’m going to be pursuing a newspaper career upon my graduation.”

  The woman at the desk looked at me as if perhaps I had a booger peering out of one of my nostrils. Finally, she spoke. “We don’t have any summer jobs,” she said.

  And that’s all she said. I wished she had said more, because I was already nervous enough, and now, with one small statement, uttered in somewhat of a you’ve-got-to-be-nuts tone of voice, I really had no place to go with the conversation.

  “So,” I finally stammered, “let me see if I have this straight. You don’t have any summer jobs. Am I correct?”

  “That’s what I said,” said the woman.

  I looked down at the floor, which is a great place to look when you’re dead, you know you’re dead, and all you want at that point is to think of a way to exit gracefully.

  I must admit I was rather shocked at the coldness the woman had shown me. You spend your entire childhood dreaming of a newspaper career, and then you can’t get past a personnel secretary when you apply for your first job.

  I recall vividly what I said to the woman as I left. I said, “Well, thank you for your time,” which wasn’t exactly a graceful way to leave. As a matter of fact, it was a rather puny way to leave.

  Later, I wished I had said, “Okay, you win round one, but I’ll be back in four years and we’ll see who wins round two.”

  Why is it you never think of clever things like that to say until it’s too late? I don’t have an answer, but the question reminds me of a story that has nothing to do with me or the newspaper business, but does have to do with wishing.