As we were returning to the cafeteria line for our just desserts, I thanked my friend Starkman for his open ear, and for his wise counsel. And he told me in sotto-voce confidentiality that he wished I had been born homosexual. That would have settled matters quite tidily.
Starkman apparently has a thing for guys who look like the husband of Samantha Stephens.
1971 BIBLIOPHILIC IN ALABAMA
Eileen stood in the doorway with her wicker beach basket in one hand and her beach towel in the other. Her chartreuse-colored, wide-brimmed beach hat, circa 1965, revealed only her nose and mouth, and it was a mouth that was turned down and petulant. “It’s an absolutely beautiful morning and you’re all sitting around here like the Dracula family waiting for the sun to go down.”
“Give me just a minute,” implored Julia, not taking her eyes from her book. “I want to get to the end of this chapter.” Julia was reading the popular horror-thriller, The Other, by actor-turned-author Thomas Tryon. Julia kept flipping to the back of the book to look at the jacket photo. He was the best-looking author she’d ever seen.
“Donna? Michael Junior?” Eileen pointed at the beach just outside the motel window. “Are you going to make your poor grandmother sit there by herself like some lonely old lady beach bum? Michael Senior, am I speaking to a wall?”
“A what?”
“A wall, Michael.”
“Of course not.” Eileen’s forty-three-year-old son was lying on the couch with his feet propped up on one of the two armrests. He was reading The New Centurions by policeman-turned-author Joseph Wambaugh.
“You’re as bad as the kids,” said Eileen. “You can’t read your book on the beach? Come keep your mother company.”
“Sure thing, Mom,” said Michael Senior, slapping the book shut and kipping up from the couch. In his most authoritative father-voice he said, “Everybody out to the beach. We came to Gulf Shores for the sun and the surf. Your grandmother’s right. We need to feel the grit of sand between our toes and the taste of salt water on our tongues.”
“Ugh!” pronounced sixteen-year-old Julia, as her fourteen-year-old sister Donna rolled her eyes with commensurate disgust. Donna had been reading The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty, who used to work for the U.S. Air Force’s Psychological Warfare Division after selling Electrolux vacuum cleaners and serving as ticket agent for United Airlines. Earlier in the morning Donna had, in the course of reading the horror novel, gasped — audibly — three times, but the sound had registered with no one but her grandmother, who had been sitting at the little table near the motel room’s corner kitchenette, reading absolutely nothing, although she had previously skimmed an article on the front page of the Mobile paper, the Press-Register, about the death of Louis Armstrong. “Satchmo is gone,” she had said softly and plaintively to herself, while recalling her honeymoon trip to New Orleans and all the Dixieland jazz she and her new husband had heard in the Quarter. “Lord, how I want to be in that number,” she mused aloud, absently conjuring up a line from “When the Saints Go Marching In”—a song that always reminded her of the now-silenced singer and trumpeter.
Eileen looked at her two granddaughters and at her twelve-year-old grandson, Michael Junior, who was reading The Lord of the Rings—specifically, the volume entitled The Two Towers. The Lord of the Rings was written by J.R.R. Tolkien, who had been, early in his life, employed by the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary researching words that started with W.
“Up, up, book vermin,” said Michael Senior, heading off to the bedroom to change into his swimming trunks from his pajamas. “Your illiterate grandmother is feeling neglected.”
Eileen allowed her beaked upper lip to disappear altogether beneath the angry bulldog protrusion of its lower companion. “I really wish you wouldn’t talk about me that way in front of the children,” she called after her son. “I know it’s all in fun. But it’s disrespectful.”
Donna jumped up and shrieked. The shriek had nothing to do with what Eileen had just said.
“This is so gross!” she pronounced, tossing The Exorcist onto the armchair where she had been sitting, scrunched into a little ball of intense engrossment.
“Don’t you dare say a word!” cried her older sister Julia. “You’ll spoil it.”
“You already know what it’s about,” called Michael Junior from the other end of the room.
“But I don’t know if the priest will succeed in getting the devil out of the girl or not. We live in a literary era in which there is no longer the guarantee of a happy ending.”
“It’d be really cool if he couldn’t do it and then ol’ Beelzebub goes and possesses the soul of everybody in Washington — even President Nixon!” said Michael Junior, who had gotten very sunburned the day before reading on the hood of his family’s station wagon and was now covered with globules of white healing salve.
“Put down the books, kids. We’re all going to the beach,” said Michael Senior, “and we’re going to build sandcastles and play in the waves and pretend to be a totally ambulatory, nearly normal American family. We’re all being very rude to your grandmother. She came all the way down here to spend time with us and look how we’re treating her.”
“I’m sorry we’re being so rude, Grandma,” said Julia, who got up from her fold-out cot to put her arms around her grandmother’s waist.
“I’m not against reading.” Eileen returned the hug. “I just think you’re all missing out on the best part of being on vacation — getting out, doing things. Michael, honey, weren’t you going to drive Mike over to the fort?”
“Sure. If he wants to see it. You want to see Fort Morgan, champ?”
“That’d be neat.” The enthusiasm in the words was only marginally reflected in the manner of their delivery.
Michael Senior clapped his hands together. “Okay, and this afternoon, you kids are going over to the Hangout and play some Skee-Ball, and then we’ll have hamburgers at the Pink Pony Pub, and…”
Eileen sighed. She exchanged a look of frustration with her son. Michael Junior was back in Middle-earth. Julia had returned to The Other, and her younger sister, Donna, was creeping warily up to the temporarily abandoned Exorcist as if it were something to be conquered through dint of will and intestinal fortitude. Donna had been told by her friend, Sherell, who had already read the book, that there was projectile vomiting in there.
Everyone took to the waters for a few minutes at least and allowed the surf to knock them off their feet — for a bit. Michael Junior tried to build a sandcastle and ended up with a sand hogan with no windows. And later, just as their father had ordered, there were greasy vacation hamburgers at the Pink Pony Pub, and Skee-Ball at the Hangout, and all the tickets dispensed by the old-fashioned Skee-Ball bowling machines were pooled and redeemed for a plastic Hawaiian hula dancer, and this went to Donna because her wildly bowled wooden ball had hit a Coca-Cola clock and knocked the minute hand off and she had been mortified with embarrassment.
That night Michael Senior and his mother, Eileen, and his three children, whose mother lived in London with her second husband, a network television news correspondent, ate fried shrimp and crab claws at the Sea-n-Suds restaurant down the beach from their motel. Each of the three offspring of Michael Cameron tried their best to be glib and engaging at the table, as dinner conversation meandered from New Orleans and the late, great Louis Armstrong to the subject of Jim Morrison, the lead singer for the rock-and-roll band The Doors, who only a few days earlier had been found dead at the young age of twenty-seven in his bathtub. Michael Senior had not been familiar with the details of Mr. Morrison’s untimely demise, the actual cause still open to speculation, while Eileen Cameron was unclear as to whom Jim Morrison even was, and wondered if he’d ever played the trumpet or sang in a phlegmy voice like Louis.