BRING ON THE BULLET
(1960)
Barbara Teal looked like a fallen angel. She had platinum blond hair, huge green eyes that turned purple in the dark, and a smile that showed all her teeth. She was famous in the high school culture of 1950s Memphis. She went to Immaculate Conception Catholic girls’ school, and dated a series of hoods, thugs, and football monsters. The first time I saw her was at a New Year’s party at the National Guard Armory, a month after our gig there with Bo Diddley. Piano Red played and Jimmy Reed’s son, Alvin, led the band. Red had long been one of my favorites. My band had played “Rockin’ with Red” and “Red’s Boogie” as part of our set since the beginning. Red was a pink-eyed albino with gold teeth. His show was an old-school R&B revue with a girl singer and vocal group. During his entire set members of the audience shouted, “Bring on the Bullet. Bring on the Bullet.”
The Bullet was a quadriplegic. While the band played a one-chord vamp, crew members placed center stage what looked like a cross between a baby’s high chair and a barstool. Next, a man dressed like a valet brought out a stuffed sofa pillow, carefully placed it on the stool/high chair, and brushed it off with a whiskbroom. The crowd chanted, louder and louder, “Bring on the Bullet, Bring on the Bullet!” Finally the stage crew and the valet carried on the legless, armless torso and head of a bald black man. The crowd went nuts. Stagehands carefully placed the figure on the sofa pillow, atop the stool-chair. The valet put a microphone in front of the motionless body. You had to wonder what he would do. The Bullet opened his mouth and screamed. That was his act. He bellowed like a banshee for two or three excruciating minutes; then the stage hands reversed the process and carried him off, stool, pillow, and all. That was it. What else could he do? The Bullet screamed, not words but pure emotion. The frustration and anger of a half a man, trapped in an immobile shell, was released in the only way he knew. I tried to imagine his life on the road, the endless time between performances. Was there an Anvil case backstage with a sign reading, THE BULLET—THIS END UP? What did he feel in those moments on stage that were all his own? What emotions came to him as the crowd of white strangers called out, “Bring on the Bullet?” Was this all he had? This time on stage, screaming? He reminded me of the organ grinder and the monkey. Who was he? What was his name? What was his life other than the golden moments in the spotlight, when he became the ultimate rock ’n’ roll singer, the supreme protest beyond Elvis, Jagger, Johnny Rotten, or Axl Rose, raging against life itself in an incoherent scream of agony, hate, and frustration?
Surely, he hated the audience that called his phantom name. He blew them away with screams from hell, like a dragon breathing fire. His howl’s burning sound seared the audience’s soul in a moment of ultimate release.
No one knows
Where the wild goose goes
After the show
It’s back in the cage
For the geek
No more chickens today
Anyway, that was the first time I saw Barbara Teal. She was maybe five feet tall. Her long platinum hair glowed like a halo. She danced and laughed, showing all her teeth, and seemed to be having the time of her life. At midnight, they lined up to kiss her. Thinking “what the hell,” I got in line and took my turn. It was electric. She tasted like strawberry soda.
Three weeks later, Barbara Teal was the new girl at school, starched and shiny in a Catholic girl’s school uniform. News spread like the plague. By lunchtime every girl in school wanted to kill her and every boy wanted to get into her pants. She showed up in my American History class last period. She smiled. “Remember me?” she purred.
“How could I forget?” I was her comrade in a sea of enemies.
Dating Barbara was dangerous, almost a dare. North Memphis greasers and football behemoths from Christian Brothers College stalked her like obsessed serial killers. We fought our way out of a party at Clearpool. One afternoon at the Toddle House Drive-In she saw some hard-dicked Harry she was trying to avoid, got down on the car floor, and told me to get out of there. It put an edge on the possibility of a long-term relationship.
Vera hated it. She and Barbara had been in a dance class together as little girls. Jealousy ran deep. “Anybody but her,” Vera told me. “You could have taken up with anybody but her, and I wouldn’t care.”
Barbara was there the night I graduated. She had one year of high school left. She looked spectacular. My grandmother liked her. They talked a long time about what a fine fellow I was. “She’s very theatrical looking,” Huddie told me. “Life is sometimes hard for a girl who looks like that.” I didn’t know what she meant, but it proved true.
When I was a senior, we played the talent show again. My parents were in Chicago visiting friends, so I had been drunk for a week. Vera and I had broken up. Barbara had come to White Station. I had a homemade stereo amp setup with a Harmony Monterey guitar with two DeArmond pickups, like Muddy Waters played on At Newport. We played “Bo Diddley”; then I dedicated “Sexy Ways” to the young, good-looking Spanish teacher, the faculty sponsor of the talent show event. Nobody noticed until Monday morning back at school. I got suspended for three days.
I had become somewhat of a celebrity in art class, especially after my first Merit Art Scholarship finalist award. Mrs. McGuiness allowed me to work unsupervised in the back area of whatever class was in session. I ignored whatever was going on in class completely.
After I saw a Jackson Pollock documentary at the Guild Art Theatre, I expanded my approach. I abandoned brushes and painted with the ends of paint tubes and a pallet knife. Sometimes while painting at home in the basement, I dragged an old towel across the wet paint, to create the idea of motion. Sometimes I beat the painting violently to change the subject and foreground’s texture and motion. One day during a freshman class, I took a painting in progress into the parking lot and beat it with a towel. Students at the window watched and laughed. I heard Mrs. McGuiness say to her class, “When you paint like Jim Dickinson, then you can laugh.” I struck the canvas again with newfound pride.
During senior finals I got a big surprise. In art class, which I figured on sleeping through, there would be a written exam. Okay. I faked my way through a section about materials and art history. But then I came to a discussion question concerning our own ideas about the creative process. I’m not sure I had ever thought about it. Art was something in which I always had an interest. It was associated with books I saw in my grandmother’s library and the museum in Chicago.
Coleridge, Poe
And Mickey Spillane.
Elvis on the Dorsey Show and
Rhapsody in Blue on the old brown radio.
My mother’s piano in Baptist Church,
Froggie the Gremlin
And the organ grinder
With the monkey.
Without thinking about what kind of sense it made, I wrote a story about an Indian:
An isolated Indian is carving a totem pole. He is unobserved, working by himself, away from any family or tribe. As he labors away on the task it starts to rain, harder and harder. A storm sweeps over the Indian artist. He struggles on through torrents of rain and flashes of lightning until he is satisfied and goes home.
Time passes. The artist returns, bringing with him a friend to whom he wishes to show his work of art. But he discovers his totem pole disappoints him. He realizes that what he wants to share is not the totem pole, but the rainstorm.
The story of the Indian and the Rain Storm demonstrates the frustration contained in the very nature of the artistic experience, and asks “Where is the art? Is the object the art or is the creation the art and the art object a shell?” This dilemma still troubles me.
Hidden in a corner of a Burke-Hall paint store in an anonymous shopping center in northeast Memphis was the Shop of John Simmons, a home-decorating curio shop. John was the son of a friend of my mother’s. He was older than me and openly gay, which took a lot of guts in the late 1950s, in a city once described as the buckle on the Bible Belt. I put my oil paintings in John Simmons’s shop, and to our mutual surprise, he sold them. The same person bought them all: “A Little Rain for Early Sooks Maxwell,” “Rex Hotel,” and “Spanish John.” They were pretty good. I often wonder what strange individual collected my paintings. I gave the rest away: “Yellow Man” to Tex Campbell; “For the Body of John McCrosky” to Newport; “Balloon Man, My Love” long ago to John Logan in Texas; “Self Portrait” to others.
In the late sixties my most successful paintings melted into the mud and decomposed in the backyard of our old house across the street from the graveyard. I have sketches now, which I fear I can no longer execute. It is my “Biblical History of Creation and Eden.” Maybe I could do it Gully Jimson style with interns or students. It may remain undone….
Other than art my only interest in school was Gene Crain’s course in speech and drama. He stimulated my interest in theatre. He got me to design sets for one-act plays, student productions. I drew up a set for The Case of the Crushed Petunias. I worked with the crew that built the flats and did the rigging. I was hooked.
The next year I drew the design for The Glass Menagerie, starring my friend, Andy Eudaly as Tom, and George Tidwell, the trumpet player for Al Stamps’s band, as the Gentleman Caller. (Andy became my partner in the Market Theatre and introduced me to my future wife, but that’s a little later.) Andy also took me to the Southwestern College Adult Education Center and introduced me to Ray Hill, the director of the Center Players. Ray had been Happy the Clown on the TV show Bozo. He was a short, fat man who looked like one of Santa’s elves.
The summer before my senior year I did drum music backstage for Sartre’s The Flies, drumming away like Olatunji while Electra did her Dance of Seduction. I got my first newspaper review: “Jim Dickinson’s drums were a goo defect.” Probably a misprint, but I have never known for sure. After my first outing on the boards at the center that summer, I did Tennessee Williams’s Talk to Me Like the Rain, acting with Barbara Anderson when she was Miss Memphis.
I met Leon Russom working at the Center Players at Southwestern College in Memphis. Orphaned and living with relatives, he had started college a year early on a full scholarship. We did Tartuffe and Sartre’s The Flies, with Leon always the male lead. He was the first person to show interest in recording my folk song repertoire. Home tape recorders were few and far between in the fifties. Leon had a nice one. He recorded my guitar and vocal version of folk songs and blues material for no specific purpose. We talked about the performance, referencing other artists and recordings. It seems like a small thing; yet it was a clear beginning of what I would do later.
The second summer at the Center Players we did a play by a local newspaperman. Strange Flowers had a beatnik scenario, set in the future. Again, Leon was the lead. I was the onstage piano player in the pit band, which included Rick Ireland on guitar and Metcalf Crump, grandson of “Boss” E. H. Crump, on drums. We were on stage providing music throughout the whole play.
The female lead, Jan Bradford, was a tiny girl with a killer deadpan Dumb Dora act. We became friends. Also in the play was John Lovelady, a Memphian who had worked in New York theatre and who went on to work with the Muppets. Leon became a pro. He was in the Broadway cast of Oh, Calcutta! bareass naked, and is still showing up as a corrupt CIA agent or crooked cop on various TV action dramas. Through Leon Russom I found Gus Cannon, but that was later, after Baylor.
I was never very interested in acting, but in my senior year Mr. Crain encouraged me to try out for The Rainmaker. I won the lead role with my pal, Andy, as the little brother in comic relief. Billy Hall was female lead. She later married Roy Cash, and has a daughter who became Miss America. I worked on my lines with Ann Moss and carried a script with me up until dress rehearsal. Crain was worried. He said, “I went out on a limb casting you as Starbuck. Did I make a mistake? Don’t let me down.” His concern was well founded. I had to flip a silver dollar fifty-two times during the play. All I concentrated on was not missing that damn silver coin.
The big night came. I dressed for the part. I had grown my ducktails back. I had a black turtleneck under my white-on-white Italian silk tux shirt, the trademark of Joe Banks, White Station’s ranking hoodlum. I wore a black leather wristband like Ricardo Montalban. I was too cool.
Starbuck doesn’t enter until halfway through the first act. Once onstage he never exits until the final scene. That night I had one of the crippling headaches that had started to plague me. I lay backstage on a couch left over from my Glass Menagerie set, and tried to relax and concentrate. I told myself, if I step on stage through the screen door into the farmhouse set, and I am still me, it’s not going to work. But if I can become Starbuck, the con man Rainmaker, the master of the flipping coin, it’s going to be okay.
The moment came. I flung open the screen door, stepped into the spotlight, and delivered my first line, “Wind? There’s not a breath of wind anywhere on this Earth.”
I heard an audible inhaling sound from the audience. A girl on the front row said, “He looks just like Kookie!!!,” the super cool character on 77 Sunset Strip, played by Ed Burns, who had the pop hit record “Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb,” and was the source of such classic pickup lines as “Baby, you’re the gingiest!”
I was a smash. I never dropped the silver dollar. A girl I had been trying to date for months came backstage after the show and picked me up. She took my striped Dr. Who scarf as a memento of the night. I never asked for it back. I took it as a major compliment. I won Best Actor in the Drama Department competition and was voted “Most Talented” of my Senior Class Hall of Fame.