The Jaycees put triangles of shrubs or flowers around some new green brass historical markers. I was all for it. Wanted to pick up on this new history of my place. One of the new plaques was set on the median of a hot intersection; tin cars were flying everywhere and reflecting sprays of plastic colors like crazy. Ten thousand folks lived in Dream of Pines now; taxes in the parish were low, and three factories had set up in one year. This plaque was on the north side of town; perhaps I’m the only guy who’s read it. It remarks on the fact that just thirty miles south of here used to be this fellow of the late 1700’s, this Frenchman, Pisroin, whose accomplishment was … with all his heart … against a wild jungle … being French. Being French. That’s it. Damn, if I could make out anything else. That’s all they could dig up for Dream of Pines.
Well, still I was drawn around town, down to the old center of commerce, with the old one-story red brick shops from 1915, neither ugly nor beautiful, as I saw it, and the red brick streets, the same, all fading now with a brownish grime that I always took to be rather charming — easy on the eye, all the angles rounding, bending. Ladders were standing thick in the street. Negroes were ganged around watching. The shopowners were putting up striped aluminum awnings and fiberglass false fronts, at three in the afternoon, in front of everybody. Bricks were falling onto the raised sidewalk and crashing down into the gutter, where I was. Some workmen inside were getting rid of these bricks with a machine that went off like a shotgun. I jumped out of the way of a few powdery brick fragments from 1915. Finally I understood what was going on. The merchants were having the brick blown out of their front walls to make room for show windows. A week later they had them, and the drugstore on the corner where I charged cigarettes under the name of milk shakes let out a huge banner photograph of a Revlon model in its show window.
This Revlon model picture stung me in the guts. She was a skinny thing lying supine in a silk outfit, with a high-heel shoe dangling off her toe. Her face was big and just this side of weird, in her silvery Revlon eye and mouth makeup. She was lying on a pillow of sand and behind her, in twilight, was the whole Sahara desert. The top of one breast stretched above the neck of her gown; one thigh lifted under the dress, so you saw she wasn’t all that skinny. She was playing with a piece of her own black hair. I had to have her. What kind of cruelty was this to have her photograph lying there? What did I have to do to get her? Her eyes looked as if they bragged on all she’d seen and understood. I would understand, I would learn all of Culture, if that’s what it took. Tears came out of my eyes. I would go to college and study Culture.
God damn Madison Avenue … New York! Why do you have to make every woman you work on into an idol? Why does she have to be silver? Why does she have to be lying out on the Sahara desert like only the smoothest Arab who knew everything in the world could possibly deserve her? You made me marry her, that luminous teenager down at Pascagoula, Mississippi. That pubescent Arab-looking girl, Prissy Lombardo, the girl who had kissed everybody! She was an underdone fascimile of the gal in the Revlon photograph. I admit it heartily. The sand, the silvery shoe draping off her foot, the eyes as wide and cognizant as animated black pearls. I had this scene with her; asked her to marry me. Prissy didn’t have quite the body of the Revlon gal. The beach was white and rippled, but not the Sahara. It was the beach of Biloxi, Mississippi. However, this beach, stretching from Pass Christian to Biloxi, was then the longest manmade beach in the world. It may be still, for all I know. Doesn’t take away any of my anger.
One last time I drove into Dream of Pines to see how the aqua fiberglass fence around the mills was doing out in all this sun. I drove over the tracks and noticed that Ann Mick’s house had disappeared. The old shack wasn’t with us any more; there was only that hideously pounded-out earth where it used to be; a few dozer swaths, crushed wine bottles, dirty newspapers, flattened and yellow. I haven’t seen Ann or any of the Micks since then. Don’t know if they went to another city or straight to hell. Mr. Mick didn’t show up at work, and poof! The Micks were our only outright slum. My heart was out there in that hot field. I remembered my dream of Ann, of our love, of Malibu; I was still under the spell of it. I was a little ashamed of it, but it still had me; I always trusted my dreams before anything else. And now the vacant field, with the terrible noon sun above it and this plastic sweat on the steering wheel dripping on my hands, was bringing me awake, miserably, horribly, like somebody waking you up by pouring warm molasses on your eyes. Hell, I didn’t want Ann any more. I knew I could do better. But the familiarity of her in that hypnotic dream … The aqua fiberglass fence was running through the middle of their former shack. Through the middle of my dreamy heart. I could’ve coughed up a portion of that fence right out of my chest at the time.
I got out of the Chevy and looked up the hill in time to see a loaded train chug into the mill yards. Then I saw the boxcars move on in; I saw it through the hot, translucent aqua fence. The boxcars had their hump of pulpwood — the stump corpses of pine trees. These look like dead octopi, groping everywhere, strangled in the daylight. Then I got a big whiff from the wooden fart fog of the mill stacks again. Saw the aqua fence trying to shield me from the oily gears of the mill that I knew so well, and I said, “Jesus.”
“Jesus, take me out of this place.” I appealed to the divine Jesus of my church.
My mother comes in waking me up, waving a letter she’s already opened. I gather up the sheets around me. Have been sleeping naked, as usual, and my own body has become an immense bore to me. I have red welts all over me from standing nude with my air rifle and firing it against the wall almost pointblank, willfully suffering the riochets when they come back.
A distinguished little denominational college in Mississippi is offering me two years’ tuition on the basis of my musical talent. I’ve heard enough …
Mother, I don’t care about the rest, that a Dr. Livace, the chairman of the music department, happened to be sitting in on my performance last year at Shreveport with Mr. Medford. That this college is strong in music — believe me, says Mother. She was born in Mississippi and is wild for anything decent going on in that state. No, I’ve heard enough.
Never mind telling me … Mother confesses she wrote a letter to the college indicating I wanted to attend. She’s worried that she has intruded and has done too much in forcing me toward this one college. Not at all, Mother.
For, after all, the letters from Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Juilliard just haven’t been pouring in, have they? 118
I grab it I kiss her and thank her. I’m going to Hedermansever College, near Jackson, Mississippi. It sounds exotic to me. It means I am not going to be in Dream of Pines next year.
BOOK TWO
1 / Our Lady of Mississippi
I made it to Hedermansever College, driving a Thunderbird which I’d been awarded through pressure on the old man by my mother. The car was three years old, a ’57, navy blue. There was a mashed fender on the right, and the interior was like an old garden glove, but it was tight and fast. It had a cockpit top you could unlatch, take off, and store in the dorm basement on good days, for the open ride and the sunglasses.