SPRING POEMS
(1961)
I quit going to classes completely and tried to focus on Rain Summer. I became obsessed with the time element, and made elaborate charts and outlines. Without Merrell around to talk craft, I turned to John Logan, the hot undergraduate playwright who had worked with me in Miss Carol as the Cajun pipe rigger on the oil drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. He concentrated on play forms, had written little prose, and had taken up with Merrell’s ex-femme fatale, now living next to Browning at the Catacombs.
Logan joined us on several of Browning’s weekend road trips. In Dallas we saw an exhibit, “Art Through the Looking Glass,” consisting of sculpture and collage, three-dimensional pieces with drawers, shelves, and hidden objects, seemingly of no connected relevance. I didn’t think about it until much later when it haunted me.
One spring day Logan and I searched out collective memories of childhood experiences, and came across an old radio serial, Sky King. I brought up the secret signal ring promotional premium.
John said, “I still have mine.”
“You what?” I exclaimed in disbelief.
“Yeah, I’ve still got it. I’ll bring it back next time I go home,” he grinned.
Green with envy, I tried to imagine the satisfaction and power I’d have if I had mine. I would be Ming, Emperor of the Universe, invincible and capable of anything.
My lack of direction grated on Browning. He was going to Pasadena Playhouse next year and trying for the Big Time in Hollywood. He would give it a year, and return to law school in Texas if he couldn’t break into show business.
“You’ve got to get your shit together,” he told me repeatedly. “You got to have a plan. You can’t just go on wandering around from one idea to another. Theatre, music, painting. What the fuck is next? You’ve got to concentrate, to settle on a direction. You’ll end up going crazy and accomplishing nothing.” He decided I needed psychic help, researched the fortune tellers in Waco, and took me from one to another. The first was an old woman born with a caul over half her face (as Blind Lemon was said to have had). I sat on an old overstuffed bed beside her. She put her hand on my forehead and rolled her eyes back in her skull.
It was a load of crap. Nothing made any sense. She looked puzzled and told me, “Nothing is coming through.”
I knew the feeling.
Ophelia Harwood was another story. She seemed to know me already. I thought about what she told me. My father was sick. He coughed up disgusting phlegm and had violent coughing fits, a “smoker’s cough.” But I sensed she was talking about something else. She told me my family would move, which seemed impossible, and that my grandmother would die. I didn’t understand her talk about playing music. I had never seriously considered it since I could not read music and had no real training or knowledge beyond what I had absorbed from Dewey Phillips and Dishrag.
I dropped out of school and withdrew from classes to avoid further failure on my permanent record. I was sitting in the Green Room at the theatre when Dr. de Laban appeared.
“Deekensun!” she exclaimed. “Are you in or out?”
“I’m out, Dr. de Laban,” I replied.
“Goot!” she said. Then she smiled a big Hungarian smile to let me know she meant it as approval and not condemnation. That was my official exit from Baylor theatre.
I planned to finish typing Rain Summer before I returned home. I worked all night and slept during the day. I looked worse than ever. I had shaved my head thinking it made me look like Jackson Pollock. I wore the same red-and-white-striped sweater and once-white toreador pants for way too long. I started drinking dark rum straight. I liked to drink alone in the dark. The words of Ophelia Harwood hung heavy in the Texas night.
I can’t remember
That last week in Waco.
It’s like a blank spot.
It might be the liquor
Or my sickness.
It might be
Of the acid test
With the monkey.
I’ll never know.
It’s all a blank.
I remember going to Breckinridge with Browning before returning home. Browning took me around his hometown and showed me off for shock value. He was strangely quiet, as if pissed off for my letting him down. I don’t know what he expected but I had disappointed him.
Browning had an old friend, a younger girl he had mentored. Sandra Hudlow was smart, an actress, a trained piano player, and as life would reveal, a lightning rod for the troubled and the talented. Hudlow and I hit it off, which irritated Browning even more. The three of us went all over Breckinridge, seeing the sights. Browning was a local celebrity and loved the audience. Before a performance at the theatre he would go into the crossing tunnel under people’s feet in the first row, lie against the concrete wall, and try to “feel” the crowd’s vibrations. “They love me, they love me,” he would say.
“They think they own you,” I would tell him. “They bought a ticket and paid money. They think they own you.”
“Oh, fuck you,” he would reply, defensively. He loved the audience. It reminded me of the organ grinder with a monkey on the string.
Saturday night we ended up at the local hot spot, the Belvina Supper Club. The Bell, as locals called it, held Browning’s hometown audience and he was putting on a show. There was no issue of I.D. or underage drinking. In West Texas things were a little wilder and more open than in Waco, the state’s constipated center under the control of tight-assed Baptists. We drank openly and without repercussion. A black jump blues band, Big Daddy Pat and His Hot Brown Boys, played on stage. After a couple of sets I felt the music’s pull, and remembered what the gypsy told me. I thought, “Okay, Browning, you want to see a show, I’ll give you a show,” and declared “I’m gonna see if the band will let me sing a song.”
Hudlow looked surprised. Browning said, “Don’t get up there and show your ass. I have to live here.”
I told him not to worry and walked up to the bandstand. The guy I thought was the leader stood by the piano, shuffling through arrangements. He looked up. “Hey man, can I sing a song?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Can you?”
I gave him my assurance. God knows what he thought. There I stood, head shaved, weird looking, white as sliced bread, and glowing in the dark.
He smiled, “What do you want to sing?”
“‘Send Me Some Lovin’. You know that one? Little Richard.”
“Sure we know it. What key?”
“B flat.” I could see from his smile he thought it was a joke, expecting me to play the fool. The band hit the turnaround from the five chord, and I came in, “Send me some lovin’, send it I pray.”
The Belvina Super Club went silent.
“How can I love you when you’re far away …” When we hit the bridge, I went up to a Little Richard note that made the whole joint vibrate. When the song was over I jumped off the front of the stage as the audience applauded wildly. I walked back to the table where Browning was grinning like the Cheshire Cat. Sandra sat, amazed.
The next morning I went to the First Baptist Church with Browning’s family. Sandra played piano. I heard people muttering, “That’s the boy who sang with the black band at the Bell last night.” I sat in the amen corner, next to a little old lady. Sandra played straighter than my mother, without embellishment. Still, it was like an old friend, a little bit like home. I was going home, home to something familiar and unknown.
The strange, shriveled-up little old lady kept winking at me. Merrell would have been suspicious. When the collection plate was passed, I took it from the usher, and passed it on to the little old lady without contributing. The little old lady also passed it on, not putting in anything. She looked up at me and smiled. I bent over to hear what she had to say, knowing things were about to make sense.
She said, “You must be just like me. Saving up for the Lottie Moon Christmas offering.”