She’d gone to college, but it hadn’t worked out. There was a boy, and they were going to get married, but that hadn’t worked out, either. She thought about becoming a flight attendant. A family friend had a connection at the Atlanta papers, and that’s how she had got the tour-guide job. She’d keep it until she could get on with an airline.
Six months later, on a warm April afternoon in 1973,1 looked at Big Eyes and she looked at me, and I just got caught up enough in that tender moment to blurt out, “Why don’t we get married?”
I didn’t think I’d ever find anything to top her, even in Harrison’s. She could sing, and she was good to hold and fine to have, so I said what I said, and she said, “Let’s do it.”
And then she asked, “When?”
And, tempestuous fool that I was, I said, “Why not as soon as possible?”
I called my stepbrother, Ludlow Porch, because I knew he wouldn’t tell me I was crazy, and I needed somebody to take care of some details.
“Ludlow,” I said, “I’ve decided to get married again.”
“What are you?” he asked. “Crazy?”
“But this is different,” I said. “We have a lot in common.”
“Oh, does she like to drink and chase women in Harrison’s, too?”
“No,” I insisted. “We both enjoy the same kind of music, for instance.”
“I like Waylon Jennings, too,” Ludlow said, “but it’s no reason for me to marry him.”
When he finally decided I was sober and determined, he asked what he could do to help. I said, “I want to have the wedding at your house, because there’s not room for me and her and the preacher in either of our apartments. I also need you to get your wife to arrange for a cake and do some decorating, and I need you to find me a preacher. But be careful. The preacher who married me and my first wife quit the pulpit and went into the used-car business six months later. I blame him for a lot of our problems.”
“I’ll do what I can,” said Ludlow.
“And one other thing,” I said. “I want to ride the train to Fort Lauderdale for our honeymoon. Trains are romantic.”
“There is still a train that goes from Atlanta to Florida?” he asked.
“No. We’ll have to drive to Savannah to catch it. It comes through about two in the morning.”
“Let me see if I have this straight,” Ludlow said. “You want to get married for the second time, even though you were a complete failure as a husband on your first attempt, and you want to do it as quickly as possible, which I assume is as soon as you can get a license and your blood tests.
“Then, you want my lovely wife to obtain a cake and decorate the house, and then you want me to find a man of the cloth who has no intentions of going into the used-car game, and then you want me to reserve you two tickets on a train that you’ll have to drive four hours after the wedding to catch at two o’clock in the morning. Is all that correct?”
“It is.”
“Call me in the morning,” said Ludlow. “I’ll get on it right away.”
Two evenings later, I stood with my bride-to-be in Ludlow’s house. He was my best man. His wife was maid of honor. Ludlow’s six kids just sort of hung out and watched.
And the preacher. Do you remember crooked Indian agents in the old “B” westerns? That’s what this guy looked like. He’d sell a Comanche a used car with a bad transmission in a heartbeat. He started the wedding by opening a Bible and uttering, “Well, according to this . . .”
It was quite obvious the man, who was wearing a toupee that looked a lot like a dead cat had been glued to the top of his head, was very inexperienced.
“Where did you find this guy?” I whispered to Ludlow as the preacher fumbled through his Bible looking for some verse he’d forgotten to mark.
“Who do you want on two days’ notice?” my stepbrother replied. “Billy Graham?”
The wedding cake was a little dry, but I did think the black crepe paper Ludlow’s wife had hung from the ceiling was a nice touch. “Lincoln’s funeral probably looked a lot like this,” I said to Ludlow.
We arrived at the Amtrak station in Savannah an hour before time. An old black man was sleeping on one of the benches. The only other person inside was the guy behind the ticket window.
“Train’s two hours late,” he said to me before I could say anything to him. “Trouble out of New York.”
“The train’s two hours late,” I said to my wife of five hours.
She had voiced some hesitancy to spending our honeymoon night—or early morning—on a train, but I mentioned a Clark Gable movie I’d seen once where he was on a train with some actress I can’t remember and they seemed to enjoy it a lot. Besides, I also pointed out what an adventure riding the train would be. I think she muttered, “This is more adventure than I can stand,” when I told her the train was two hours late, but I couldn’t be sure because it was hard to hear her words over the snores of the old black man sleeping on the bench.
Then things got ugly.
I told the ticket agent my name and that my wife and I had a bedroom sleeper compartment booked to Fort Lauderdale.
He asked me our names.
I told him.
“Nope,” he said. “Got no reservations for a sleeper under that name. You’ll have to go coach.”
I would have screamed, but the old black man seemed to be sleeping so peacefully, and I didn’t want to alarm my wife any further.
Imagine us starting out in life in coach where people who coughed a lot and carried their belongings in paper sacks would be located, and there would be no way to lie down.
“There obviously is some sort of mistake,” I said to the ticket agent. “I know these reservations were made, and I must advise you also that that woman standing over there and I were just married, and if you don’t come up with bedroom accommodations for us, we are still going to get on the train and go up in coach and perform wild sexual acts on one another, which will get us arrested, I am sure, but it also will disrupt the entire train and be terrible public relations for Amtrak when the story hits the papers.”
Noticing the ticket agent was a frail man, who wheezed and was probably one of the ten people in the world I could frighten with physical violence, I also said, “Not only that, but before I board the train, I am going to come behind this window and kick you and punch you and pull out what is left of your hair and call you and members of your family terrible names. Then I’m going to spread the word over this entire community that you are a bed-wetting, homosexual communist. Do you have that clear?”
The ticket agent began making telephone calls. A few minutes later, he called me back to the window.
“It’s the best I can do, I swear,” he said. “There isn’t any bedroom space available, but I can get a roomette.”
For those unfamiliar with railroad sleeping accommodations, a bedroom will sleep two. A roomette will sleep one. Barely. A roomette is sort of like your closet with an army cot in it. Two small dogs would have trouble carrying out the mating process in a roomette.
Then it hit me. Ludlow. He did this on purpose. He purposely didn’t make us any train reservations because the man has a sick sense of humor and decided to play a very cruel practical joke on two crazy kids in love.
I took the roomette because I had no other choice, then I phoned Ludlow and awakened him and said. “This is really funny.”
“What’s funny?” he asked back as he emerged from his sleep.
“You not making us any train reservations,” I said, my voice bristling with anger. “We’ve wound up with one roomette. One or both of us could get hurt trying to carry out a honeymoon-night function in that small a space.”
“You think that’s funny?” said Ludlow. “Let me tell you what else is funny. Remember the guy with the weird toupee who married you?”
“How could I ever forget him?” I said.
“He was no preacher. He runs the Texaco down the street. I got him to marry you in case you changed your
mind about all this during the honeymoon and needed an out.”
I never mentioned that part to my new wife, of course. I was so convinced only death would do us apart, I felt Ludlow’s idea of doing me what he considered a favor was anything of the kind. We were married now, and there would be no turning back.
You can have sex in a roomette on a train hurtling through the Florida night, by the way, but I didn’t have the nerve to tell the chiropractor how I actually injured my back.
We drove back to Atlanta a week later. On a Friday night. Fort Lauderdale had been great. We’d phoned our parents. Her dad sent champagne. But the minute I walked through the door of my apartment, where we had decided to live until we could find something larger, the feeling hit me.
I looked at my wife, and she still had those eyes—but why were there suddenly bars on my windows? And what was she doing with those leg irons? And I wondered if maybe I could say, “Listen, baby, I’m going out for a couple of hours. Okay?”
I could go down to Harrison’s. I’d keep my ring on, honest. I’d sit at the bar and have a drink. Alone. I wouldn’t think of flirting. Of course I wouldn’t. I was married. I’d be back before ten, and we’d make love and then watch an old black-and-white movie and go to sleep, me tight to her back, holding her as we slept.
But I didn’t ask. Instead, I just sort of sat around and tried to ignore the feeling. But the son of a bitch wouldn’t go away.
It came back every day. It started about noon and peaked at the cocktail hour.
I tried everything. I even found an apartment in the far suburbs and moved us there, miles from Harrison’s and nights out on Peachtree Street. We made friends with married couples in our complex and had cookouts. We even got a dog.
I’d make margaritas, and we’d sit on the floor and drink them, and she’d sing “People” and “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane” and “Me and Bobby McGee,” and I’d join in on “City of New Orleans,” a song about a train, and we’d laugh about our honeymoon night.
But that goddamn feeling wouldn’t leave me.
Friday night. Stuck in the ’burbs. Cooking out with the Flournoys, who fought constantly.
I still loved her, but there was some hate for her, too. Why had she agreed to marry somebody like me? It was her fault. If she’d turned me down, I’d never have had to go through all this.
When I finally went crazy, I went hard and crazy. I gave in and went to Harrison’s after work one afternoon. I scored and got home at two in the morning, and she cried because I hadn’t called her. I lied, said I’d got into a poker game and had too many drinks and had simply forgotten to call her and promised I wouldn’t do it again. But I did, two days later. I walked into Harrison’s—with my ring in my coat pocket.
She cried a lot and the Flournoys broke up and our dog turned up pregnant. But at least I had being executive sports editor down. I had the people I wanted, and I went to a meeting of an organization called the Associated Press Sports Editors in New York. A guy from somewhere came up to me and talked about the graphics we were doing in Atlanta, and he said he liked the page 2 concept and wanted to talk more about it, and he said, “I really like what you guys are doing down in Atlanta.”
I felt proud. Despite whatever would happen in my second marriage, I knew one thing would never change. I would never leave the Atlanta Journal sports department. Maybe when Bisher retired, I’d take over the column and give my replacement hell, but I would always be in that place.
Then Durwood McAllister, managing editor of the Journal, asked me to go to lunch with him one day. After he had eaten, he looked at me and said, “You’ve done a great job in sports, but I think you’re ready to move up.”
It would take me four years to get over that statement.
Chapter 15
THIS WAS TO BE my fourth promotion in my young newspaper career. I had been promoted to sports editor of the Athens Daily News, to assistant sports editor of the Atlanta Journal, and then to executive sports editor of the Journal. Now, my managing editor, Durwood McAllister, a nice man everybody called “Mac,” wanted me to leave sports and become associate city editor of the paper.
“I want you to do the same thing on the news side you did in sports,” Mac announced.
I asked him what he meant by that.
“We’ve got too much government news and not enough people news,” he said. “I like the way you emphasize people on the sports pages.”
Here was his plan: I would move to the news side and work under the present city editor, a rotund individual named Bob Johnson who was always writing me memos telling me what he thought I should do in sports.
“Call me buttinski . . .” his memos would begin, and then he would make his suggestions, all of which I ignored. It wasn’t that Bob Johnson was a bad person or anything. I just figured I knew all there was to know about producing a sports section by that time, and if I wasn’t going to listen to Bisher, I certainly wasn’t going to listen to somebody who spent his days editing stories about dull public-service commission hearings.
After six months as associate city editor, Mac explained, I would have the news side operation down, and I would then become city editor, replacing Bob Johnson. I was not clear on what was going to happen to Bob Johnson at that point, but, to be honest, that wasn’t my major concern.
My major concern was that I really wanted no part of the Journal news side, which seemed to have the imagination of a piece of Velveeta cheese.
The graphics were terrible. The front page always looked the same—as if all the type, heads, and photos were put into a shotgun and fired at the page. Very rarely was there anything on the front page that resembled any effort to give the reader something he or she could enjoy. Vietnam certainly was front-page news, but it seemed to me the Journal ran the same lead headline every day:
“BIG MARINE GUNS BLAST
HEAVY RED BUILDUP”
In fact, I distinctly remember the first edition coming up one day with the headlines transposed. It read:
“HEAVY RED BUILDUP
BIG MARINE GUNS BLAST”
There was one time, however, the news editor, who designed the front and decided what went where, did attempt to put something on the banner that didn’t have to do with Vietnam or a new sewer system for some suburban Atlanta county.
Harold Lloyd, the comedian who made ’em howl back in the early days of movies by hanging off buildings, died at age 408 or something. The Journal news editor, Carl Newton, who was nearing retirement, was a big Harold Lloyd fan. Maybe 15 percent of our readership had ever heard of Harold Lloyd. Carl put Harold Lloyd dying as the lead story in the first edition. (It went inside the paper in the second edition.)
We often laughed at the news side in the sports department. Some reporter actually did a series on the sewer system in one of the suburban counties that ran longer than a pregnancy. “Art Carney couldn’t talk that long about sewers,” Frank Hyland observed.
The sports pages and the news pages looked as though they were from two different newspapers. Our sports pages were tricked up with borders and big photo and type set in different widths. I was convinced that good layout was important. I smoked Marlboros because I liked the way the pack looked. I wanted my pages packaged well, too. In the last several years, newspaper graphics have changed dramatically. USA Today prompted practically every paper in the country to go to a large color weather map. And there are few papers left (The New York Times being one) that don’t have color on the front page as well as modern graphics.
So Mac said, “I want you to do the same thing on the news side you’ve done in sports.” But the problem was, I couldn’t. The city editor certainly could assign stories and edit copy as he saw fit. But the city editor had nothing to do with the layout of the pages or where stories were placed. That was the news editor’s job.
What I really wanted to be was executive news editor. I wanted control of it all. Give me the same control I had on sports, and in fact, I’d do the exact same
thing on the news side I’d done in sports.
Nope. Associate city editor for six months, then city editor.
I didn’t want it. I knew I didn’t want it. I had the job I wanted, and I wanted to keep it for a long time. Going to the news side seemed like being transferred to Newark.
But what if I did eventually get to do what needed to be done— redesign the news section? What if it won plaudits? Would I then be able to one day move into a managing editor’s job?
Power. Big-time power. And big bucks, too. I was convinced the managing editor made at least thirty thousand dollars a year—all the money on earth.
I took the job. I think the reason I did was because of a flaw in my personality that makes me never want to disappoint anybody. I hadn’t wanted to disappoint my mother, which was the primary reason I never stole a hubcap or hung out at the pool hall and always studied hard. I hadn’t wanted to leave writing and go to the slot for Minter, either, but I didn’t want to disappoint him. And Mac was a nice man. He was impressed by my work. I didn’t want to disappoint him, either.
The new associate city editor of the Atlanta Journal started work Monday morning at six-thirty. By eight, I knew I had made a horrible mistake.
I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody I’d be moving up to city editor in six months, but I think Bob Johnson knew something was up. He didn’t exactly welcome me with open arms.
I sat on the city-desk rim. Johnson was at the head of it. Three other assistant city editors were seated around the rim. I made four. Bob Johnson handed me a story from the education reporter. It had something to do with an important Board of Education meeting coming up. I read it. It was boring. I repaired a little grammar and punctuation, but that was about it. The story went into the city-desk box, then a copy person picked it up and sent it down to the composing room.
Bob Johnson handed me another story. It was about some ordinance the city council had passed. Does anybody really read this stuff?
Carl Newton, the news editor, sat at a desk behind me. Charles Salter, the photo editor, who also wrote about fishing on the outdoor page, sat next to him. What will follow soon is the dialogue they had my first day, deciding on a photograph for the front page of the Atlanta Journal.
If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground Page 30
