BIG JIM AND ELVIS
(1949–1956)
I don’t remember when trouble started between my father and me. When I was born, he stopped gambling and drinking heavily. After we moved to Memphis, he started to slip. Part of the problem was his job. In Chicago he had been executive vice-president of the Diamond Match Company. When they closed the Chicago office, the company wanted him to move to New York. Like L.A., it was big-city business, and he didn’t want to raise a family in that environment. Thank God.
In Memphis, Big Jim was demoted to regional manager. After a few years, Diamond Match closed its Memphis office, and again wanted my father to move to New York. Instead he took another demotion, and ended up a regular wholesale traveling salesman, i.e., where he had started.
He no longer wore the custom-tailored three-piece business suits from Chicago with a beaver fedora. He changed to corduroy sport coats, flannel shirts, and a gray Stetson. He started calling himself “Old Man Dickinson.” He was doing business with people he’d known all his life, people who knew his father. He drove from town to town, through the Mississippi and Arkansas delta, peddling matches, toothpicks, and clothespins at wholesale warehouses to tough country merchants in shirtsleeves. It was a far cry from commanding an office of clerks and pretty young secretaries. Colonial Country Club where he played golf was another world from the Chicago Athletic Club, where he had taken steam baths.
Maybe that was it, but it could also have been the rebellions of a teenage son in love with black music. Big Jim blamed it on “that damned movie,” as he called Rebel Without a Cause, which we saw as a family (if you can imagine that). My mother didn’t take it as personally as he did.
We started to argue at dinnertime. He would come home from what my mother called the “Jute Mill,” a day of selling to customers he didn’t necessarily like. How exciting could counting clothespins be? He would have a couple of drinks to unwind. By dinnertime he was looking for a fight—and there I was. We argued about my schoolwork, my friends (most of whom he thought were worthless), not cleaning up my room, little things that would suddenly become important issues. We argued about the length of my hair and eventually about politics. He was a hardline Dixiecrat. He blamed the world’s woes on FDR and hated Eleanor more than you could imagine. I was always half a Commie. I had a magazine picture of Castro on my bedroom wall.
He started to gamble again. On Saturday afternoons he played golf at the country club. He stayed at the club and played cards all night sometimes. My mother said nothing, but things had changed.
My grandmother Huddie was the peacemaker. When she visited, she sat between father and me at the dinner table. When we rode in his car, she sat in the back with me, and kept me from hanging over the front seat and starting trouble. She pulled my shirttail and shook her head “no” when I was on dangerous ground. My mother acted like it wasn’t happening.
My old man and I shared many character traits, which made the conflict more intense. I never fought back physically, but I didn’t back down when he got mad. Sometimes it was bad. Playing catch as a kid made me feel uncomfortable and frustrated my dad. Due to my screwed-up vision, I have never been able to play sports. I could usually judge pretty well between multiple images, but if I looked into the sky to catch a ball, I was lost.
He took me fishing and duck hunting a couple of times. Once we went deer hunting with my mother’s uncle, Dave Huddleston, up in Minneola, Missouri, at my great-grandparents’ old home. (The railroad and the highway had bypassed Minneola, and the town had dried up and blown away, except for the Huddlestons and a couple of hound dogs.)
Great Uncle Dave, the youngest of three children, stayed home to take care of his parents. His brother and sister had gone off to school. There was Indian blood in the family and it showed up in Dave. An old Indian burial ground and a cave were on the family property. Great Uncle Dave married late to a younger woman. She died in childbirth and he went wild. Neighbors heard him crying and howling in the night like an animal. The child, a girl, was taken away from him and raised in an orphanage. Great Uncle Dave took up living in the Indian cave.
When my father and I went to Uncle Dave’s, ostensibly on our deer hunting expedition, Uncle Dave produced a big pickle bottle of clear white moonshine. That night I discovered the reason my father drank. Typically, my father was a mean drunk, but on this moonshine he turned into a teddy bear. I saw him drink white corn whiskey twice and the same thing happened both times. He smiled and chuckled like a happy child. He sang college songs I had never heard him sing, and he tried to perform an odd dance, the “Cootie Crawl,” he claimed to have mastered in Oklahoma. He was a new and different person without a care in the world. I think my father had an allergy to something in store-bought whiskey; it could have been the source of the sinus cough that plagued him all his life and turned into emphysema.
My best friend was Bill Madison. We met in Boy Scouts and our families were close. My mother knew his mother from the P.T.A., and my father knew his father from the Methodist church he sometimes attended. Bill’s family lived close to school. He had two sisters and a brother, who was building a hot rod out of a ’32 Ford in their backyard. They had a beat-up old upright piano they let me pound on and some good records, my favorite being “St. James Infirmary Blues” by Phil Harris (Jack Benny’s bandleader).
We hung out together in school, and on Friday or Saturday night we met our girlfriends at the movies. Many weekends Bill and I went into the country to run his father’s coon dogs.
One spring afternoon we talked about our future as we walked through a thicket of sweetgum trees somewhere east of town.
“What do you want to do when you grow up, Jimmy?” Bill asked out of nowhere.
“Have adventures,” I said.
“Isn’t this an adventure?” he replied.
“No. This is fun, but I mean real adventures far away with famous people.”
“This adventure is good enough for me,” he said.
I hoped I had not hurt his feelings, but I wanted intrigue and danger, like the adventures in Captain Midnight, Sky King, and Gene Autry and the Phantom Empire.
The summer before junior high school, my family went on a vacation to Kentucky Lake-Paris Landing. Bill went to Scout camp. We planned to meet our girlfriends at the Park Theatre when we returned home on Saturday. But my family stayed at the fishing camp over the weekend. When we got home notes were tied to the doors of our house: “Don’t let Jimmy call Bill Madison.”
I knew it was bad.
Lightning had struck and killed Bill while he was walking the dogs out in the country. Newspapers reported it as a “Freak accident—killed instantly—one bolt of lightning in the brief storm—standing under tree.”
The funeral was over. They had tried to contact us at Paris Landing, and had the Highway Patrol looking for us. I missed the whole thing. I’m just as glad I did. My world closed around me. My girlfriend attended the funeral like it was a social event. I never felt the same way about her.
I don’t know where the darkness came from. My mother said it was the Dickinson black-Irish mood. Like the music in my head, it was always there. After Bill Madison was killed, I lost my bearings.
First day of class in the seventh grade I saw a kid sitting in the back of geography class drawing cartoons like a madman. Gauger could draw a whole cartoon frame with one or two super clean lines but his cartoons were wordless pantomime. He saw my drawings with word balloons and went nuts. It had never crossed his mind to add dialogue. We cartooned back and forth all year.
Gauger was an army brat. His family moved to Hawaii after that year. I knew from drawing with Gauger I would never be a cartoonist. My hand wasn’t steady enough. My vision was too weird; my line wasn’t clean. I would always be frustrated.
The next year, with Gauger gone, I took my first art class at White Station. Ronnie Stoots from Sunday school was in the class. The teacher, Dorothy McGinnis, was the first person to encourage me in the arts. She became my champion and protector through high school.
My limitations led me away from realism. She encouraged me to reach, to push the visual perception of the object beyond its two-dimensional boundaries. I took extra art classes in high school instead of study hall. During other classes, I worked on my art projects and assignments.
In art class Ray Fitts, an accordion player, told me about Elvis. He had seen Elvis on the Dorsey show and said I had to see him. The second time Elvis was on the show, I tuned in. He sang “Tutti Frutti” and “Blue Suede Shoes,” then came back and did “Baby, Let’s Play House.” The world and the future changed. It was like seeing Will Shade and the Memphis Jug Band, only turned up and rocking.
Black shirt, white tie, just like Tony Cabooch. His hair was long, black, and anointed with grease. It was beautiful. He was beautiful. He smiled a sneering smile and stuttered, “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.” The trio behind him was simple, solid, and rocking like no white country singer’s ever. They might have looked like Hank Williams’s Drifting Cowboys, but they sounded more like the stage band for the Harlem in Havana dancing girl show at the Cotton Carnival Midway. They had the Jug Band’s same almost-out-of-control-power, but these were white people on network TV.
I was there when Elvis played his first gig in Memphis after the Dorsey TV shows. He had just released “I Was the One”/“Heartbreak Hotel” and bombed playing Vegas for the first time; it was too much for middle-aged mobsters. Nationally, he was breaking out bigger than anyone since Frank Sinatra.
Ellis Auditorium consisted of the North Hall and the Music Hall. Elvis would perform to both sides at once. My father got me a ticket from a friend at WHBQ. I sat, surrounded by strangers, waiting to see the truck driver from Tupelo. My seat was second from the aisle, maybe twenty rows back. To my right sat a teenaged girl who looked sixteen. She sat quietly, not moving a muscle. The opening act was Hank Snow, the Singing Ranger. He performed alone. He was a very small man with a big country and western guitar, a spangled Nudie suit, and cowboy boots. His big song was “I’m Movin’ On.” “When you hear my wheels hit the tracks, you’ll know your true lovin’ Daddy ain’t comin’ back,” he sang. The girl beside me didn’t respond to his performance in any way, though others applauded and screamed.
After a brief intermission, Elvis’s band took the stage alone. For the first time in Memphis, they had a drummer. After one instrumental number, they brought out the Jordanaires quartet. Still nothing from the girl on my right.
Finally, I asked, “Are you all right?”
She looked at me blankly and said, “I’m saving myself for Elvis.”
When Elvis walked on stage, she went nuts. I did, too. So did every human being in Ellis Auditorium North and Music Halls. He walked slowly onto the stage, grinning to the crowd. He wore blue slacks and a bright green sport coat with a white shirt and no tie. He carried his guitar behind him loosely, almost dragging it. An electric charge ran through the audience; every molecule of air seemed to vibrate.
He worked the crowd, which responded to his every move. With one audience in front and another behind, he wheeled around, holding himself up with the microphone stand or falling to his knees like a tent revival preacher, pointing his finger at the audience and pleading. He seemed to be simultaneously playing to each individual and posing for a thousand photographs. Every move was perfect. He prowled the stage like a big jungle cat. He teased and joked with the crowd like a long-lost friend. He introduced his mother and father, seated in the audience to my left. They stood as a spotlight swung to pick them out.
After what seemed like only a few minutes, he said, “Well, ladies and gentlemen, this is our last song. It’s a new one we learned in Las Vegas. Me and the boys are going into the studio and record it next week. Hope you like it. This has been real nice playing for the home folks and all and now I only got one thing to say. YOU AIN’T NOTHIN’ BUT A HOUND DOG,” he sang, “cryin’ all the time.” The tempo was up with the rumba pattern bass line, common to early rock ’n’ roll, syncopated to the top eighth-note beat. Elvis let his guitar swing down almost behind him, as he gripped the microphone and sang “You ain’t never caught a rabbit and you ain’t no friend of mine.”
He sang the same verse over and over, but it didn’t matter. No one cared. It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen. He was like a preacher at the end of his sermon, inviting lost souls to follow the profession of faith and join the body of Christ. People ran down front on the sides of both stages, filling the aisles as Elvis stalked like a striptease dancer, and fell to his knees as the tempo cut to a slow drag. Elvis sang the last chorus, half again as slow as the rest of the song, like Muddy Waters at the end of “Got My Mojo Workin.”’ I talked about the show for months. I described it in detail to friends and family whenever I got a chance, spreading the new religion of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, or as George Klein would say, “Elvis Himselvis.”
In seventh grade I had an English teacher who turned me onto Edgar Allan Poe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the first a drunk and the other a drug addict. There was something compelling about the darkness and mystery surrounding them. Their words were thick and deep. “Kubla Khan” held me in its power. I discovered the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which took my imagination beyond the Western world to Oriental spiritualism and antiquity. It was like discovering another Bible, a history of man seeking another world, a world of soul.
On Wednesday nights, my father worked Arkansas, Mississippi, or Missouri. Wednesday was also the night my mother played piano at the church for choir practice. I enjoyed having the house to myself. One night I dug below the nightclothes in the bottom drawer and pulled my father’s bourbon out of his chiffon robe. It tasted bitter and strong, but warm in my belly. I was safe in bed by the time my mother got home, so she was none the wiser. It became a weekly ritual.
I started stealing a little liquor here and there from spots around the house where my father stashed bottles. Bourbon, gin, vodka, rum, even white wine. I poured it all together into a fruit jar. Friday nights, I put the fruit jar in my car coat’s oversized pocket, and snuck it into the picture show at the Normal or the Ritz, “B” movie second-run houses beneath the Plaza’s social level. A couple of my troublemaking friends and I would purchase large grape or orange sodas with lots of ice and empty the fruit jar. That’s how it started.
Later, I made screwdrivers with orange juice and terpin hydrate with codeine cough syrup and sat on the floor of my room, listening to jazz 45s. My favorites were “I Hear a Rhapsody,” the flip side of Earl Bostic’s “Harlem Nocturne,” and a Moondog EP I found in a Little Rock dime store. Moondog, a blind street musician, made remote recordings of his strange, percussive rhythm band. On the record, I could hear whistles of steamships in New York Harbor, bells of passing trolley cars, and zoo animals’ roars, all part of the normal city soundscape. (Years later the Moondog record inspired my keyboard part on the Paris, Texas motion picture score.)
I accidentally discovered the Memphis underground art community. The Guild featured foreign movies and art films not shown in commercial family theatres. There was no popcorn or soft drinks, but free coffee and lemonade. I saw the Bergman and Fellini films, but most importantly, Jazz on a Summer Day and Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus), which had a long-lasting and recurrent effect on my life.
The Book Shelf bookstore had a selection of Evergreen Reviews and Folkways Records; the Adult Education Center on the Southwestern (now Rhodes) campus had a bookstore in the basement and a resident theatre troupe, where I first trod the boards.
In the fifties Memphis’s artistic underground was sparse and spread out. A pseudo art colony was by the river and the railroad yard where author/historian Shelby Foote lived. Other artists lived near the Academy of Art, next to the Overton Park Shell in Midtown. The Shell, an amphitheater/performance venue the WPA built during the Depression, was the Memphis Symphony’s home.
Musicians actors painters
Sculptors and dancers
Separated into camps with little crossover or mingling
This was the bitter
of the Beatniks
The Beat Generation
of Hip and Cool
Jazz Poetry
The beginning of the folk music revival
Guiltless drunkenness
Exploratory sex
The first curiosity about drugs and Eastern religions
A generation destined to consume
Itself
Searching for answers
To poorly defined questions
Old
Before its time
Beat
I did pretty well in school before junior high. I liked math and science, but then came spelling and a cursed writing class in seventh grade. I couldn’t spell due to my screwed-up vision and couldn’t write clearly due to the tremor in my hands. My hands didn’t shake badly; they shook like A. P. Carter from the Carter Family. The first time you “fail” is traumatic. Then you get used to it. You realize the world does not end. I still can’t spell and I write like a trained monkey. In junior high I started having headaches. These days it would be seen as a symptom of dyslexia. After an EEG, during which they failed to put me to sleep with a triple dose of sodium pentathol, “enough to knock out a horse,” as the doctor said, they sent me to a head shrinker, a hypnotherapist who taught me self-hypnosis as a remedy to what he diagnosed as “nervous tension headaches.” He also provided my first tranquilizer.