Ah, but then one night at Trailways when the three of us were sitting side by side faking interest in the pages of the Times-Dispatch (the paper for which I worked five nights a week), we couldn’t help but notice a tall, lean, cheaply dressed, youngish man (probably in his mid to late twenties) staring at us with shy curiosity. B.K. beckoned him closer and asked in his clownish singsong voice if the fellow would like to join the circus. The man’s blue eyes widened, he chuckled and shook his head, less in dismissal than in disbelief. Whereupon Mary Lou, for whom lying came as naturally as breathing, said, “We’re serious. Come along and join up with the circus.”
He hesitated, as if trying to comprehend. Then he said, “Just a minute,” and as he walked away, limping slightly, still shaking his head, I was thinking how much he looked like one of the poor migrant farm workers from The Grapes of Wrath; like a young Henry Fonda, beaten down yet somehow hopeful. He left the waiting room and went outside to the loading platform. A few minutes later, he returned accompanied by his young wife -- pretty in a washed-out, equally downtrodden way, barely filling out an obviously homemade cotton dress -- and two small, skinny children. They made straight for us, us with our zany Bozo faces, stopped, smiled tentatively, bashfully, and indicated they were prepared to follow us wherever we might lead them, as if a job with our nonexistent circus was the answer to their desperate prayers.
The three of us rose slowly, dropped our newspapers, mumbled something as incoherent as it was inadequate, and sheepishly made for the front exit. On the way back to the Fan, nobody spoke. I’d never seen B.K. so close to tears. Even Mary Lou, whose heart was so hard you could have drilled holes in it and used it for a bowling ball, was subdued. I tried to offer something philosophical, but the words stuck in my throat. It was as if we were in mourning, perhaps for our own sensitivity. At the studio we quietly scrubbed our faces clean with a force that came close to self-flagellation. And we never played bus station clowns again.
By 1960, Richmond’s Village Inn was starting to earn a nationwide word-of-mouth reputation as one of the alcohol-vending establishments (the Seven Seas in New Orleans, the Blue Moon in Seattle, the Cedar Tavern in New York, and Vesuvio in San Francisco were other examples) where gigless be-boppers, itinerant artists, nonacademic poets, freelance photographers, practicing existentialists, self-proclaimed revolutionaries, dharma drifters, “angel-headed hipsters,” full-time eccentrics, and newly christened beatniks of varying plumage could expect to be tolerated by management and welcomed by regular patrons (many of them students with fake IDs), ever eager for fresh stories from the American road, an exchange of intellectual ideas; and maybe, just maybe, someone new and exciting to sleep with.
Richmond was hardly a destination city, however, nor was it strategically located along the great Kerouacian highway, the well-thumbed route between New York and Denver, Denver and San Francisco. Moreover, the Fan District was essentially a small island -- Fan(tasy) Island -- of cool in an ultraconventional right-wing ocean. And there was one other reason why the Village Inn was relegated to a relatively minor role in the spiritual/sexual/social transformation that commenced to sweep over the United States in the late middle of the century: namely, like all licensed venues in Virginia, it had to turn off the beer taps and evict its customers at midnight (hard liquor couldn’t be served in a Virginia restaurant at any hour).
For the Village’s youthful patrons, though, the Cinderella curfew did not necessarily mean the cessation of merriment, particularly not on Friday or Saturday nights. When the public gathering ended, the private fun began. The scene would simply move to a volunteer’s apartment; or, occasionally, to the roof of a commercial building to which one of the revelers had semi-legal access. It generally worked out well, although there were a number of times when the police showed up uninvited, intent on keeping somebody’s grandpa’s idea of the peace. Oddly, police raids seemed always to occur at a party at which Mary Lou was in attendance. There were cynics who actually suspected her of tipping off the cops, and I must admit she seemed strangely excited, even elated when news of some such raid would make the papers, particularly if she was mentioned by name. If there was anything Mary Lou loved more than chaos, it was attention.
Unlike the typical post-adolescent soirée, where making out or striving to make out was the primary objective, those Fan after-hours parties had a more creative focus in that they often revolved around a group activity I called “the Language Wheel” (a conceptual image I fished from the deepest well of Indo-European mythology) although nobody actually referred to it by that name or by any name at all.
With neither a leader nor a discernible signal, a number of people would at some point sit on the floor in a circle. Then, drumming on bottles or cans -- occasionally on an actual bongo -- while Paul Miller blew short trills on his flute, participants would take turns improvising lines of poetry. The painter William Fletcher Jones would usually start it off, intoning dramatically, slowly, solemnly, “The old man came over the hill with a sack of goodies on his back,” a favorite line of his; then the person next to him might add, “ . . . ever aware of the little plastic lobsters of sectarian constipation snapping at his heels.” And so it would go, around and around the circle, line after line; some clever, some funny, a few genuinely poetic, most trite, and all too many resembling the babble escaping through the bars of a madhouse window on the night of a full moon; around and around until the “poets” ran out of beer or inspiration or consciousness, whichever came first.
(Sociologists should note that these high jinks occurred several years before marijuana, let alone psychedelics, became available in Richmond.)
It’s just as well that I can’t recall any of my own contributions to the Language Wheel, although I did participate despite my inconvenient hours of gainful employment. Between eleven-thirty and twelve on a Saturday night, a friend would go to the telephone booth just inside the Village’s entrance and ring up the newsroom at the Times-Dispatch. When he or she had me on the phone, I’d be informed of the location of that night’s party, and usually I’d head directly to that address as soon as I got off work. Over time, those parties all have run together in my memory, but two do remain distinct.
One summer night, just as a Language Wheel was getting under way on a rooftop on Grace Street, a great Southern storm rolled in. Saw blades of lightning stabbed the heavens with the mania of a serial killer, followed by Wagnerian crashes of thunder. Those in the wheel exchanged cautious looks but nobody wanted to be the first to break the circle. Then the charcoal belly of the sky split open and from the gash there gushed torrents of rain. In a matter of seconds everyone was drenched, yet the circle refused to break, proving perhaps that poets, even inept amateur poets, are tougher than the athletes who play professional baseball.
Eventually, however, the improvised lines of free verse became essentially inaudible, sounding as if they were being delivered underwater. By irritated dolphins. When a mouth opened to speak a line, one could almost see bubbles escaping, and Paul’s flute seemed to be imitating a faulty pump in a swimming pool. But I’m pleased to report that it wasn’t until the storm had passed that we fools sloshed off to our respective flats, dorm rooms, and rented carriage houses in various parts of the Fan, leaving behind the beer cans and bottles on which we’d drummed our own silly little bohemian thunder.
Then there was the time someone called me at the paper earlier than usual to disclose that that night’s party was already under way at a private residence in Windsor Farms, an ultra-tony suburban neighborhood in Richmond’s upscale far West End. This wasn’t entirely unprecedented. Occasionally a lawyer, surgeon, or corporate executive -- someone who ought to know better -- would invite a few colorful crazies from the Village to one of their parties, thinking that their regular guests might find the infidels amusing. They usually came to regret the impulse, especially after their home was invaded by maybe twenty thirsty hipsters when they’d been expecting six or seven.
This part
icular party was on its last legs when I finally arrived at the house, a lovely white brick Tudor, a style much favored by Richmond’s anglophilic elite. My friends, I was told, were all out on the patio. I thought I detected the sounds of a Language Wheel in progress there, but was in no rush to find out, being not merely sober but hungry enough to eat one of the gold-framed fox-hunting prints off of the living room wall. Into the deserted dining room I went, directed by raw instinct. Sure enough, a big bowl of creamy dip sat there on the dining room table, but, alas, the rest of the hors d’oeuvres had all been consumed. Not one cracker or chip remained, let alone a carrot stick or stalk of celery. Still, that dip looked mighty tasty. If only . . .
There was one other item on the table. Right in the center, a single medium-size chrysanthemum blossom of exceptional hue floated in a porcelain saucer. I recalled then that in Japan chrysanthemum flowers were not only eaten but considered a delicacy. I hesitated, but not for long. Snatching up the blossom, I plunged it in the dip and took a bite. Umm? Not bad. I repeated the process and was on my third chomp when I heard footsteps. The host was entering the room.
Instinctively, I hid the ragged remains of the blossom behind my back. The host gasped. “Where’s my mum?” he demanded of no one in particular. Perhaps he was appealing to angels on high. I shook my head and as I did so he noticed the several petals now clinging to my dip-smeared lips.
That chrysanthemum, I was soon to learn, had won first prize in the annual prestigious Richmond Flower Show that very afternoon: it was a blue ribbon champion of which the man was inordinately proud. The way he carried on, I might just as well have eaten his wife and kids.
I left without saying good-bye.
Although it was at the opposite end of the social spectrum from the Village Inn; at the opposite end, in fact, from just about any spectrum one might suggest, there was in the Fan another dispenser of liquid refreshment (or so it seemed) that sued for my attention. I dubbed the place “Il Palazzo della Contessa di Pepsi,” but it displayed no name outside or in, and was overall so nondescript that there were times when I doubted its existence.
It was the lone commercial establishment on a quiet, shady residential block a fair distance west of RPI and the Village, and thus largely unknown to both students and bohemians. Its clientele? I’m not certain who were its customers, if any, for while it appeared to be in business, it was so marginally so that its identity as a “commercial establishment” is subject to question. Occupying a storefront on the ground floor of an old town house, long since converted to rental apartments, there was, as I’ve indicated, neither signage nor any other reference to the merchandise for sale therein.
The proprietor of the store, my “contessa,” was an elderly woman, though not so elderly, so frail, or so obviously batty that I might blame dementia for the fact that she chose to sell nothing at all except Pepsi-Cola. And the bottles of Pepsi, of which there were a great number, weren’t even refrigerated. This was not a place where on a sultry Richmond day you could pop in for a cold pop. Yet cases and six-packs of Pepsi, stacked high and frosted only with dust, lined the walls on either side, while individual bottles (never a can) marked time on shelves behind the equally dusty counter.
Adding to the intrigue were the shop’s hours. The contessa (the sobriquet was mildly sarcastic, for she was plain in dress and demeanor) elected -- for reasons I assume known to her alone -- to open her doors from 10:17 to 11:53 in the morning, 2:36 to 4:41 in the afternoon. I may not have the numbers precisely correct, but you get the idea. The hours were odd. Very odd. And they were strict. You couldn’t show up at, say, 4:42 P.M. and expect to gain admittance let alone a warm cola.
That I never asked the old lady to explain her strange hours or her singular choice of merchandise was due primarily to my reluctance to dispel the mystery. Einstein equated the mysterious with the beautiful, and while the nameless and dingy little Pepsi outlet did not exactly embody an exquisite equation addressing relativity or the secret origins of the universe, it did direct one’s attention to both the mysterious, ambiguous nature of “time” and our heavy-handed and somewhat arbitrary efforts to force logical order upon it. If the shop’s contents were monotonous, were static, its uneven, seemingly illogical hours of accessibility (which were subject to change without notice) had a way of mocking our notions of both harmony and permanence. The store seemed simultaneously fixed and boundless: it silently accentuated the conflict between measured time and the unaccountable infinite.
Okay, okay. Admittedly, I’d been reading the Surrealists that year and also had recently fallen rather madly in love with the avant-gardists of la belle époque, so it’s probably not wholly exceptional that I would take satisfaction in the manner in which the dusty little Pepsi store seemed to quietly push back the frontiers of logical reality -- which may explain why, whenever I passed the place on foot or in a vehicle, the words that would come unbidden to mind were those of the poets laureate of the subconscious, the radical bards of the imaginative absolute. And why, for years thereafter, when friends asked why I always ordered a Pepsi instead of a Coke, I tended to smile nostalgically and quote André Breton: “I prefer red like the egg when it is green.”
People rarely asked me twice.
19
love it & leave it
If charm were a bathtub, Richmond could have floated a hundred rubber duckies and still had room for half the Royal Navy. With its antebellum architecture, its broad boulevards (a noted European critic once wrote that Richmond’s Monument Avenue was “the most beautiful street in America”); with its heroic statues, its blossoms, its birds, its boughs, its high-tea manners and grits-and-sorghum hospitality; with its cautiously frisky, intoxicating springs; and its horsey, gilt-edged falls, Richmond was a study in slowly barbecued, lightly salted grace. Ah, but a big front has a big back, and Richmond had a dark side wider and muddier than the James River that cuts through the city with a bourbon track.
Never mind the annual Tobacco Festival that marshaled lavish floats, dozens of marching bands, and a court of competing beauty queens to celebrate -- yes, celebrate! -- a smelly, highly addictive substance responsible for millions of deaths the world over. And never mind the Civil War Centennial, a fête that was to last precisely as long as the horrific conflict itself, and that would make no effort to conceal -- nor spare any expense to demonstrate -- Richmond’s pride in having served as the capital of the Confederacy during the most shameful period of America’s history. I’m inclined to set aside those commemorations, and the bloody war and the killer weed that inspired them, to focus on a livelier, more persistent skeleton clacking its bones in Richmond’s charming closet.
There are historians who will point out that some good did result from the Civil War (abolition of slavery for example); and apologists who laud with some justification tobacco’s prominent role in the economic rise of our young nation. There can be no plea, however, on behalf of racism, no defense that isn’t as evil as the attitudes and policies of racism itself. And here let me emphasize that I bring up the subject not to jab a stick in Richmond’s once-blind eye, an orb that while still not 20/20 perhaps, can nowadays distinguish a fellow human being from an inferior subspecies and behave accordingly; but, rather, because Richmond’s racism colors (if that’s not a poor choice of verbs) the two wiggy but consequential stories I wish next to tell.
On my writing room wall there hangs a poster so faded and worn it might have once hung in the men’s toilet at the Crazy Horse Saloon. It depicts a caricature of a horned beast and reads like this: The Rhinoceros Coffee House Presents Tom Robbins / Poetry Reading & Lectures on Alley Culture / Set to Jazz (Paul Miller’s Primitive Four) / 18 Jan. 1961 / 9:00 / 538 Harrison. I’m unsure why that old poster has remained in my possession all these years when I’ve lost so many other doubtlessly more valuable souvenirs and mementos along the way. Yet here it hangs, and from it hangs a tale.
The Rhinoceros was opened a half block from the Village Inn by a couple o
f acquaintances cashing in -- though God knows it made precious little money -- on the beatnik coffeehouse fad that had begun a few years earlier in San Francisco. Well, you couldn’t have a real beatnik coffeehouse without beatnik poets, and since Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg were permanently occupied elsewhere, I volunteered to substitute, hastily composing a sheaf of poetic rants specifically for the occasion. (As that editor at the New Yorker would attest, I would have had to be as mad as an outhouse rat to fancy myself a true poet.)
While in the course of my reading I confessed my love of the city, I also employed twenty-three shades of satire and twenty-four of hyperbole to box Richmond’s pretty pink ears, box it for its Tobacco Festival, its upcoming Civil War Centennial, its affected anglophilia, and, most resoundingly, its racism. Amateurish though my poems surely were, my metaphors were inventive, my imagery outlandish and funny, and those in the small audience seemed receptive enough -- with one notable exception. In the middle of one of my rampaging verses, a young woman got up and stalked out, not unobtrusively, mind you: she was in a huff and made certain everyone knew it.
I recognized the woman, I’d seen her in the Village a time or two, although we’d never met. She was difficult to ignore, frankly, being tall, blond, shapely, and as creamy as a hot vanilla sundae. Her name was Susan Bush (no relation to that nefarious gang down in Texas), and she resided not in the helter-skelter Fan but the formal West End, the daughter of one of those aristocratic old Virginia families that had lost its wealth but not its conceits. She worked for a brokerage firm and her friends (and presumably her lovers) were stockbrokers, bankers, and lawyers; all very Episcopalian and unwilling to let you forget that their colonial ancestors had settled Jamestown and established grand plantations while yours were digging potatoes behind some thatched-roof hovel in the old country.