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

by Lewis Grizzard

  The boy needed a lot of work.

  Kay began picking up pieces of the midwestern, dull-as-dishwater accent, which concerned me greatly. Her initial appeal to me had been the lovely lilt of her South Carolina low-country manner of speech.

  I first noticed the change when she said good-bye to me on the phone one day. Most southerners get off the phone by saying, “Bye,” which sounds more like “Bi” with an extremely hard i.

  Chicagoans said, “Bye-Bye,” with the emphasis on the second “bye.” It was sort of like, “Bai-Bai.”

  I said to her, “Don’t start sounding like these people. We’ve got to maintain some of our heritage.”

  Perhaps that was the first fissure in our Chicago relationship. Gradually, it got bigger.

  How to Convince Your Wife to Leave You in Ten Easy Lessons:

  1. Get lost in your work (See PAULA).

  2. Get up before she does and go play tennis, then go to work and don’t come home until you’re too tired to do anything but lie on your couch and ask her to bring you beer.

  3. Share no interests with her.

  4. Have only your own friends. Don’t pay any attention to hers.

  5. Expect dinner. Don’t ask for it, expect it.

  6. Take out the stress you feel from work on her.

  7. If she thinks she has the talent to sing and wants to go up to Lincoln Avenue pubs with her guitar, laugh at her for being so naive as to think she could be discovered like Bette Midler.

  8. If she wants to take a cultural tour of the city, say, “I ain’t going to no art gallery.”

  9. If she wants to get romantic and build a fire in the fireplace, say, “If you want a fire, build it yourself. Who do I look like, Daniel Boone?”

  10. Lose her trust.

  I did them all. All ten. I lost her trust in Atlanta with my fooling around at Harrison’s, and then I added to the problem with the other nine when we got to Chicago.

  She left me.

  That was fifteen years ago. I remember every vivid detail:

  It was early May. I caught a train from Chicago to Dallas. I went to Dallas to attempt to hire a young sportswriter named Randy Harvey from the Dallas Times-Herald, one of the country’s top new talents.

  I offered the job to Randy, and he took it. I boarded the train Saturday afternoon and arrived back in Chicago Sunday afternoon. I caught a cab home.

  Kay had supper ready.

  “Why don’t we go to a movie after you eat?” she said.

  I couldn’t. Hoge, two weeks earlier, had given each department head another newspaper to study. We were to report the next day on what we had learned from the paper we had studied and comment on what we thought was good or bad about it and what we could learn from it to make the Sun-Times better. I had The New York Times.

  Unfortunately, I hadn’t worked on my report. Sunday night after dinner was my last chance.

  I finished eating. I spread out The New York Times on our kitchen table and went to work.

  We had a balcony off our living room. Kay walked outside and was gone a long time. I could tell she was upset, but I still had to do my report.

  I tried to make up for it Monday. In the afternoon, after the department-head meeting, I called her at home. I suggested I bring home a couple of steaks and some champagne and we could spend a romantic evening together.

  It’s odd what the mind records indelibly. I was sitting at my desk in the sports department. I had the phone to my left ear talking to my wife. I had bought a paperback copy of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. I was staring at the cover as we talked.

  “Don’t bother with the steaks or the champagne,” Kay said.

  “You’ve already planned dinner?”

  “Let me ask you a question: What did you do for dinner before you married me?”

  “I ate a lot of frozen fish sticks,” I said.

  “You might want to stop by the Jewel and get some,” she said.

  I asked, “Why?”

  She said, “Because I won’t be here when you get home. I’m leaving you.”

  She hung up. I kept staring at Ragtime.

  Give her a couple of days and she’ll get over it and be back, I thought. How many husbands have thought that when their wives first left them?

  But Hudspeth had spoken a truth once. He had said, “Women will forgive and forgive and forgive. But once they turn on you, it’s over.”

  And it was.

  I spent the next eleven months living alone in Chicago. I tried everything to get Kay to come back home. I called her, I begged her, I promised to change. I hurt. God, how I hurt.

  I’ve still got a mess at the newspaper, I’m uncomfortable with where I live, winter is coming, there’s no Harrison’s. And my wife has left me. I spend long hours and much money talking to friends long-distance back in Atlanta. I called my stepbrother one lonely Friday night.

  Late Saturday afternoon, I got a call from him. He and his wife were on the outskirts of Chicago and wanted to know how to get to my apartment.

  “I’ve never heard you so down,” he said when he arrived. “I was afraid not to come.”

  That helped. Until he left.

  I’d never felt as alone in my life. This wasn’t my town. These weren’t my people.

  I kept hoping a miracle would happen, and Kay would come back. It was often that I asked myself, though, Do I really love this woman that much? If she came back, would I change like I said I would, or would I go back to my old ways?

  And what if this had happened in Atlanta? I had my pals in Atlanta, my support group. I would have Harrison’s on Friday night as a means of filling the void.

  I could never answer any of that. And it didn’t matter. That was Atlanta, this was Chicago.

  I did a lot of eating alone. Drinking alone is bad, but eating alone is worse. You’re alone and sober. I stopped going to bed. I would lie on the couch watching television until I went to sleep. Falling asleep on a couch in a living room is preferable to a man filled with the demons of loneliness and regret, lying in a bed meant for two in the dark and the quiet.

  The drinking. It’s not supposed to be an answer, but it helped. I would sit at John Barleycorn’s some nights. Or I would walk to the 2350 where they had two Eddie Arnold country songs on the jukebox and Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train to Georgia.” I listened to that a lot.

  I tried Division Street, Butch McGuire’s. The Bombay Bicycle Club. I never scored. There was no Hudspeth around to lay the groundwork for me.

  And the old feast-or-famine rule was working against me. That goes like this: If you are married or have a steady girlfriend, you’ll run into more good-looking eligible women than you could handle in a lifetime. You’re loose, you’ve got something at home to go back to, and they are everywhere. But get down and out. Get with absolutely nothing. Be desperate. You haven’t got a chance. Famine. Dog days. The locusts have come, and the earth is dark and without form. I couldn’t catch a break.

  One day, I saw a lovely blonde walking through the newsroom. Despite my classic male fear of rejection, I got on the elevator with her and rode down to the lobby. On the way down, I introduced myself. She introduced herself. She was with somebody’s PR firm. She seemed receptive. I asked her for a date. She accepted.

  She came to my apartment by cab. I cooked us steaks. I served us a bottle of wine. Afterward, we sat on the floor in front of a fire Daniel Boone could, in fact, have built.

  I’m not really certain what happened, but this woman had just completed one of the est things, and she was trying to learn to be assertive. We got into a large argument about something, and the next thing I knew we were screaming at each other and I was calling her a cab.

  I turned thirty in Chicago. I gave myself a birthday party. I invited Tim and his wife and Sid Cato, another tennis friend, and Johnny Reyes and another guy named Carl, who also lived in the building. Carl was single, and was always bringing home lovely women.

  Tim gave me a houseplant. Sid gave m
e some tennis balls. Johnny Reyes gave me an album of genuine Colombian music. Carl brought me a girl.

  Her name was Lorraine. She was sexy.

  “This is Lorraine,” said Carl. “She’s yours for the night.”

  Lorraine left the next morning. She gave me her telephone number, but it turned out to be bogus. I called Carl. He said he’d heard Lorraine had moved to the West Coast.

  I dated a girl at Playboy. Not a Playboy girl. A girl who worked at Playboy. She used to make fun of how skinny my arms were.

  I rode the train home for a long weekend and met a girl in Atlanta.

  She came to see me a few times, and even brought me barbecue sandwiches. When she realized I was looking forward to the sandwiches more than I was looking forward to her, she stopped coming.

  Kay got her own apartment and a job. I called her an average of four times a day to beg her to come home. I began to neglect my job.

  Clendenen, my assistant, scolded me. “You’ve got to get off the phone and pay more attention to what’s going on around here,” he said.

  I ignored him.

  Kay finally leveled with me:

  “Remember that weekend you went to Dallas?”

  “I remember.”

  “I never felt as lonely in my life. All you did was work. You never had time for me. On Saturday, I went to down to the Oak Street Beach. A man came up to me and asked if he could sit next to me. Me. I told him I was married.

  “He asked me where my husband was. I said he was out of town on business. He said, ‘If I were married to somebody like you, I wouldn’t leave town and leave you out here all alone.’

  “Nothing happened, but I did realize I was somebody, too. There were people who thought I was attractive and had talent.

  “When you ignored me that Sunday night and went to work after being gone for three days, I walked out on the balcony and made up my mind to leave you.”

  “Is there somebody else in your life now?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And you are never coming back?”

  “Never,” she said.

  Sid Cato talked me out of suicide. He told me something I’d never known about him, something he had never talked about before.

  Sid had a wife and kids. He was devoted to them. The family went driving one Sunday afternoon. Vandals had taken down a stop sign at a country intersection. There was nothing to tell Sid he was coming to an intersection.

  He drove into it. A truck hit his car broadside. His wife was killed. One of his two children was killed. “I’ll never get over that,” he said to me. “My grief and my guilt were enormous. I thought about killing myself, too. You never get over loses in your life, but you can get better with time.”

  I probably wouldn’t have killed myself anyway, but Sid did give me some hope.

  And Tim Jarvis helped. Despite our different backgrounds, we became close. He and his Puerto Rican wife, Paula, worked together counseling Hispanic families. Tim was the most intelligent, sensitive man I’d ever known. I would talk. He would listen.

  We had the tennis, and he was a regular in my poker games. Tim had a VW beetle, like my old ’66. When I first began playing tennis at Mid-Town, I had to ride the bus. Imagine how I looked at six-fifteen in the morning, standing there in a snowstorm with two tennis racquets under my arms.

  After I met Tim, five mornings a week he would pick me up in the VW and drive us to the tennis center. Tim was the least demanding friend I’d ever had. Except for one episode for which I will never forgive him.

  One bitterly cold morning, he called around five-thirty and told me his car wouldn’t start. We both took the bus to tennis. Afterward, he said, “Let’s take the bus back to my apartment. I need you to help me push my car into a garage so it will warm up and I can get it started again.”

  Sounded easy. It wasn’t. In the first place, the garage was three blocks away from where Tim’s car was parked. In the second place, there was snow all over the street, which made pushing his VW like pushing a tank. In the third place, I hadn’t bought my rubber overshoes yet, and there I was pushing a Pershing tank down a snowy street in Chicago in subfreezing weather in a pair of loafers. It took us an hour to get Tim’s car into the garage. I had snow all over me. I had snow internally. I ruined another pair of shoes.

  I asked Tim, “How long have you lived in Chicago?”

  He said, “All my life.”

  I decided Tim wasn’t as smart as I thought he was.

  I thought, If I could just get the hell out of Chicago and get back to Atlanta . . .

  But I didn’t see a way out. I’d only been in Chicago just over a year. To leave would send a message that I couldn’t cut it. To leave would be a defeat. And what would I do back in Atlanta? Work in a convenience store?

  To make matters worse, Jimmy Carter was about to be elected president of the United States. When Carter had first run for governor of Georgia, the Athens Daily News had endorsed him. He lost the election, but came back to win later.

  When Carter brought his Illinois campaign to Chicago, he met with Hoge and other editors at the Sun-Times. Hoge invited me to sit in. I had known Carter slightly when he was governor. He remembered me. And, incredibly, his Illinois campaign manager was a former minister at the Moreland Methodist Church where I grew up. More incredibly, he had performed the marriage ceremony of my mother and stepfather at the church when I was ten.

  All that made me more homesick. The South suddenly was hot. The national media was discussing southern language, southern politics, southern food. “Good ol’ boy” was a new catchphrase of the time.

  After the meeting with Hoge, I asked him what he had thought of the governor.

  “I’ve never seen a candidate more well-versed on the issues,” he said.

  I felt a good measure of pride.

  Tim and I watched the election returns together in November 1976. He was for Carter, too. He was for Carter because he was a liberal Democrat. I was for Carter because he talked the way I did. When the networks declared him the winner over Gerald Ford that night, I got teary.

  Give me some credit, though. I did take a few positive steps. I got reinvolved with the paper. Randy Harvey turned out to be brilliant. I assigned him what we called “take-out pieces,” longer stories profiling athletes or looking into issues that were beginning to crop up in sports—drug use, high salaries, etc. I assigned him the best piece he wrote at the Sun-Times.

  I was stripping the wire one afternoon and came upon a short that announced the death of tennis star Jimmy Connor’s father in Belleville, Illinois, downstate, across the river from St. Louis.

  I knew about Jimmy Connors and his mother and his grandmother who had trained him, but I’d never read a word about his dad. I sent Randy to find out more.

  Mr. Connors had been a toll collector on the Martin Luther King Bridge over the Mississippi. Randy found a bar he frequented. The patrons said he would come there to watch Jimmy play. They said even after a Wimbledon or a U.S. Open, he would never hear from his son or estranged wife. That was the kind of story and writing I wanted, and Randy could deliver.

  I had also convinced Hoge to allow me to hire another columnist. Fitz was fizzled, and Gleason was still in the left-field bleachers. I thought a new columnist, one who bit hard and could also write humor, would give us an edge on the Tribune, which had a larger staff and many more resources than we did, but in my mind lacked the sort of sports columnist I thought Chicago readers would like, a Bisher or a Jim Murray.

  I interviewed Dave Kindred from Louisville. His wife didn’t want to live in Chicago. I couldn’t pay him. I finally hired Tom Callahan from Cincinnati. He wrote well. I liked his ideas. He said to me, “I want to play the Palace.”

  He lasted a week. I edited a few lines of a couple of his columns, and he resigned and said, “This isn’t the Palace, it’s the Orpheum Circuit,” and went back to Cincinnati.

  I hired Ron Rappaport, who was covering baseball for th
e LA. Times. He wasn’t exactly another Murray, but he worked at his craft and was easy to deal with. That meant a lot.

  But I never did construct a feeling on the staff like the one that had been so evident in Atlanta. The camaraderie was never there. Maybe it was the Guild that did that. The relationship between management and staff, in so many ways, was adversarial. The new people I brought in were with me, but most of the older ones weren’t. It was as Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda said once: “Half the guys on the team love me. Half hate me. It’s my job to keep the two apart.”

  The rap on me from the anti-Grizzards was that I played favorites. And I did. I gave the plum assignments to the people who would cooperate. I ignored the ones who wouldn’t. That’s one way I hung on to at least some of my sanity.

  I decided to take another step I thought was positive. I decided to move out of the apartment where Kay and I had lived together as man and wife. We were still only separated, but I knew divorce was inevitable. Sid encouraged me to move. It would be a major part of my healing process, he promised.

  So I found a new place, an apartment a few blocks south on North Cleveland Avenue. It was an old brownstone. The owner and his wife lived downstairs. They had rented me a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor.

  It was late fall 1976. The movers came in the morning. They left to take a final load to the new apartment. I decided to go back through and see if anything might have been left behind. One more walk through, then I would leave this place and, hopefully, the anguish associated with it. I felt as positive as I had felt in a long while.

  The last place I checked was the closet of the bedroom Kay and I shared. There was nothing left hanging, and there was nothing on the floor.

  Then I looked at the shelf on top.

  I saw the white furry hat.

  On Christmas Eve 1975,1 still hadn’t done my shopping for Kay’s gifts. I planned to go to Marshall Field around five. I’ve never been an early Christmas shopper.

  But I hadn’t got out of the office until after seven, and I hit Marshall Field in a mad rush. I forget what else I bought my wife for Christmas that year except the furry white hat.