THE PLOT SICKENS
(1960)
Knowing how you are going to die is terrible. I had the same prophetic dream over and over. I am by myself and a knock comes at the door. A man I have never seen before is there. He says, “Are you Merrell Williams?”
I answer, “No.”
He pulls a gun and shoots me.
Merrell would screw anything with a hole between its legs that wasn’t its asshole. Young, old, short, tall, he took on all comers. One night he told me he was researching a new play. “I need to have an affair with a married woman,” he giggled in a gleeful, almost sinister way.
Trouble started. His research subject was an upper-class drama major whose husband coached football. She was from a rich Texas family. A building on campus bore the family name. Her father was the chancellor’s childhood friend. The scandalous affair quickly heated up and became hideously public. Before it was over she had moved out on her jock husband and taken their infant son with her. She moved into the Catacombs next door to Browning; the beginning of the end.
With a dramatic sense of when to exit, Merrell decided to move to pursue acting in New York. We had a farewell party at the apartment the night he was to leave. We drank, sang dirty songs, and whooped it up Texas/Mississippi style until we put him on the bus.
I couldn’t afford to keep the apartment alone. I had learned to live on cheese and ketchup sandwiches, saving my money for liquor. There was no way to go back to the dorm, even though I still officially had a room, a shell I visited only under cover of night to change clothes or hide from prevailing evils.
I moved into the Catacombs, an antebellum mansion, replete with slave quarters, divided into two-room apartments. The Catacombs drew me in. Browning had an upstairs unit that stuck out over the driveway like a porte cochere. The overhanging room had windows on three sides so the dry Texas wind could blow through. I took up residence on the floor in front of the gas space heater, and spent many a night wrapped in an army blanket, curled up like an old hound dog in front of that heater. It was one of the happiest times of my life, but it didn’t last.
Jimmy Browning was a real talent. Most of what I learned about Baker’s Baylor Theatre technique I learned from Jimmy. He also gave me the foundation of my ongoing Texas education. He was from Breckinridge, a little West Texas town he loved. Baker’s technique was rooted in childhood memories, a sense of place and region. One of Baker’s big exercises involved “walking out your rhythm,” a repeated hypnotic process that helped an actor access his character’s inner core. We went to the Waco cemetery at night and would “walk out our rhythm.” Jimmy organized groups of theatre students for trips to the graveyard. We drove through Cameron Park, a big weird city park on the Brazos River. There were long winding trails, landscaped gardens, and thick live oak groves along the river on a high rolling bluff. Browning was an instigator, a motivator. He wanted to become Scrooge McDuck, sit in his money bin, throw gold coins into the air, and let them rain on his head. Browning woke up every morning with a jerk, sitting bolt upright and saying, “God damn.” I never asked him about it.
He was a rabid Goldwater Republican with no sympathy for my enthusiasm for Kennedy. He and Sharon were tight friends but argued about politics. She raked him over the coals: “Now, James Lee, you can’t buy into all that fascist crap. You’re too damn smart for that!” Jimmy believed the same “guns in the basement,” anti-Catholic propaganda my parents did. Sharon told him, “All that garbage comes from a William Inge play!”
One Sunday we went to First Baptist Church in downtown Waco. Before the sermon, the deacons locked the doors. Then the preacher delivered a vitriolic diatribe against Jack Kennedy, the Pope, and all Catholics like nothing I had ever heard. Browning ate it up. It scared the crap out of me like the handbills with a big red cross that appeared on the windshield of your car if you parked downtown: “Be A Man/Join the Klan.” Waco was the home base of the Knights of the White Camelia, an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan. Ultra conservative DJ Paul Harvey broadcast eight times a day.
The presence of so much bigotry was tough on us misfits.
The institutional order of the University
The Baptist
Anti-Catholic prejudice
And anti-communist paranoia
The deeply
Ingrained
Political conservatism
Of my parents
And some of my good friends
Browning was an ROTC officer. He kept a borderline haircut that enabled him to slip by in ROTC and theatre. He had been an Eagle Scout like my father and an Order of the Arrow, the highly secret brotherhood exclusive to Eagle Scouts. Their secret rituals and running around naked in the woods were too much for me.
We were polar opposites but with one unifying desire. We both loved to party. Many a weekend night the apartment filled with theatre and art students and many bottles of wine. I brought my electric guitar back after Thanksgiving. When a party reached critical mass, I turned it up and played the Bo Diddley rhythm as long as I could stand it. A girl from Hawaii danced an incredible hip-undulating boogie that left little to the imagination. There is much to be said for so-called primitive cultures where the men play music and women dance in pre-sexual ritual.
Not wanting to repeat the grueling bus trip experience of Thanksgiving, I took the train home at Christmas. The girl who played the piano score for Charley was on the train, too. She was intimidating, a big beautiful girl with jet black hair. I didn’t know her well, but we talked all night. Like me, she felt like an outsider at Baylor. Unlike me, she was making good grades. But the work was unrewarding, the Baptist sisterhood did not accept her, and she was disappointed with the theatre. She wasn’t coming back after Christmas.
I told her I was frustrated, too. I felt directionless. I couldn’t figure out if I wanted to concentrate on theatre, painting, or writing. She said I was lucky. Art was about conveying emotional information to an audience. If you managed to communicate your art to one other person, you were successful. It was what I needed to hear when I needed to hear it. She was an angel, like Dishrag, sent at a critical time to show me the way.
I never saw her again. We shared a cheese sandwich, doughnuts, and milk. I owed her a debt I couldn’t repay.
When I got home I was on fire. My family was confused. My old friends were confused. I didn’t care. I went back to White Station High. Mr. Cain let me lecture to speech class. I let them have it. Plosive exercises and all. I was in the best physical shape of my life from swimming and the exercises from Where’s Charley? and Whistle in the Wind rehearsals. I was strong and wound up tighter than Dick’s hatband. I had the Biblical strength of Samson. My hair was longer than it had ever been. I told my parents it was for a part in a play.
Vera was between Ivy League boyfriends so I was able to spend time with her. Her family Christmas tree had tiny red lights with one string that blinked off and on. I stared at it for a long time. It seemed to go in and out of focus. I thought about the campus and empty theatre. A few months ago my world had been small; all the people I knew were in Memphis, Little Rock, or Chicago. Now I knew people from all over. My world was growing, expanding, spreading out to touch the stars. I felt lost in Memphis. I drove around, looking for that safe hiding place behind the wisteria. It wasn’t at the Toddle House. It wasn’t at good old White Station High School. It wasn’t at Vera’s house.
I discovered a burgeoning bohemian scene at the Cottage Coffee House in Midtown. The Cottage served coffee, featured poetry readings, and flamenco guitar music. There was a chess game in the corner. It was a great place to hang. After hours, the friendly chess game often turned into cutthroat five-card stud.
I felt at home immediately. T.J. Oden, a frat brother from high school, sat on the stage. He had gone from being a clean-shaven, straightlaced frat boy to a hairy, bearded deviant, sitting in a coffeehouse reading a Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem. Another kid I recognized, Jimmy Crosthwait, was beating on bongos. I wasn’t alone. Right after T.J. read his poem, I sat down at the out-of-tune piano and played something nondescript.
Back in Waco, I felt more comfortable at the Catacombs than at the dorm. The Texas winter inspired me to work on Rain Summer, the novel I started in high school. I brought my portable typewriter from the dorm, and started to rework and type the manuscript. I looked out the window of the old house. I could see the lights on the dome of the administration building. My book lay in stacks of paper all over the room. A sudden breeze blew through the rooms; the bamboo curtain flopped against the windowsill, and paper blew off the bed.
My participation in classes dwindled to a trickle. Grades were posted in the administration building. As anticipated, I had failed five classes. The surprise was an A in Drama 105. The twelve quality points from that A canceled out the Fs and Incompletes and kept me in college, a second chance I didn’t want.
The most interesting member of Baylor Theatre was Dr. Juana de Laban, the movement teacher. “One does not walk or dance on the stage,” Dr. de Laban said in a thick Hungarian accent. “One moofs!!!” She called her classes Movement. I signed up for her class second semester. First day of class she told me, “Dickinson, if you do not choose to wear zee dance belt, you have my permission to work in your blue jeans.”
She focused on music I had done for the first two productions, and asked if I would help her with music for a piece she was to stage depicting the Creation of Life. Of course, I was delighted. We took classical music and ran it backwards on a tape recorder, adding percussion, bass, and drum hits slowed down to the wrong speed. She grinned with delight when I hit the top of my guitar amplifier and made the echospring reverb unit rumble in anger. “Very goot, Dickinson!” she exclaimed, “Very goot!!!”
University censors were confused and suspicious of Dr. de Laban’s concept of creation; it was not strictly Biblical. She had dancers in material tubes, sometimes two in the same tube, like huge amoebas and protozoa, by far too Darwinian for Christian standards. Still, nothing was said. The administration had to respect Juana Baby. She was the coolest.