I left Dallas on the afternoon train, bound for Tulane University in the city most unlike Dallas that I knew of: New Orleans. My hair was cut short and I wore a black suit. I had the idea from reading magazines that college students were carefully dressed nearly all the time.
There was a feeling I had whenever I traveled from Texas to Louisiana that I was moving back in time. Trains throw you off time anyway, since you are always passing the rear of things—people’s backyards, the back ends of buildings, nothing ever faces onto the tracks—and the rear of things is timeless. Louisiana has a starkly uncharming antebellum quality about the tarpaper shacks in the countryside and the skinny black children waving at the train that never stops for them. It is the South, the Deep South, which doesn’t begin, as far as Texans are concerned, until you cross the Sabine River. There is an air of prehistory about this country of mossy trees and dark water. From the train window it would be easy to imagine the Louisiana landscape as a Disneyland cyclorama in which some gigantic mechanical sauropod would lurch out of the swamp and we would all scream.
Outside of Berkeley, American campuses were very much under control in 1965. For the freshman on the train, the word “collegiate” was still a fashion statement. I had never heard anyone speak of “relevance” concerning my studies, or “imperialism” in connection with my own country. “Oppression” and “Third World” were ideas so freshly coined that I hadn’t tested their worth. The events that were going to change my life and my country had already been set in motion, however. Watts had burned. Operation Rolling Thunder—the bombing of North Vietnam—was under way. Betty Friedan had published The Feminine Mystique two years earlier, although as yet there were very few women aware of feminism as a movement. The Pill had made its debut in 1960, and it was beginning to find its way into the hands of unmarried coeds, most of whom, in my experience, obtained prescriptions through dermatologists who were willing to support the conceit that it cleared up acne. The student revolt, prompted by the war, had not yet been announced, although something momentous was bound to happen, given the extraordinary numbers of students entering the nation’s universities. I had never heard of Haight-Ashbury. I had never smelled the sweet, acrid odor of marijuana. The Gulf of Tonkin was a headline, but I seldom read the news. Why should I? Wasn’t college a sanctuary where the gates closed on daily life? I should turn my attention now to the eternal, not the ephemeral, to Latin grammar and the Wife of Bath and the complexities of cell division, not Western movies and baseball box scores and news of the world.
I shared a cabinette on the train with another Tulane freshman named John Scurry, who was going to study architecture. I envied him his resolution. I was still trying on professions, hoping to discover myself among the infinite possibilities. I wanted to be a writer, but in my mind writers were a chosen race, like the Jews, with whom they frequently coincided. Over the summer I had endured a battery of aptitude tests, with inconclusive results. “Just don’t go into medicine,” the counselor advised me. I showed no talent for it and, until then, no interest. But the thought of losing an option was unbearable. Immediately after the test I contacted a family friend who was a doctor and began making rounds with him. He took me on a tour of his charity cancer patients, condemned men and women in shuttered rooms, and although I knew from the first glance of their incurious eyes that I would never make a doctor, I held on to the option. I told my cabin mate that I was going to study pre-med.
Hurricane Betsy struck us in Alexandria, Louisiana. By the time she reached us she had already devastated New Orleans and flooded the lower Mississippi valley. The train came to a dead stop on a blank stretch of track fifteen miles beyond the city and sat there, all systems shut down, for eighteen hours. At first it was thrilling—the thrashing winds, the incredible pounding rain—but there was too much security on the train even in the face of a hurricane to believe in danger, so we began to think of other things, such as the absence of air-conditioning, the loss of the dining car in Alexandria, the odor of the other passengers. At first we were all in it together. Gradually we fell into cliques. We began snapping at each other; it was easy to see cannibalism lurking ahead. A honeymooning couple grew alarmed after ten hours of this and decided to flee the train. I recall them disappearing into the sheets of the storm, carrying their suitcases back up the track toward civilization.
When we arrived in New Orleans it was as if the Bomb had fallen. Oak trees were ripped up by their roots; automobiles had been tossed about like toys. The cabbie who picked me up at the station was in a state of exhilaration. He pointed out the ironic symbols of destruction. We passed a Conoco station with all the consonants blown off the sign, and a Shell station with no S. The health department was in a panic, the cabbie told me excitedly, because Betsy had washed the cadavers out of the raised cemetery vaults, and old bodies mingled in the flood with the freshly dead. On the streets I noticed people picking their way through shards of glass and broken tree limbs, staring at each other with dazzled smiles.
New Orleans was old and rotten, corrupt, depraved, licentious, a grand old whore who had enjoyed herself too much but was still generous enough to give pleasure to someone else, someone new. It was a Catholic town and indifferent to progress. After the charmlessness of Dallas I fell in love with the overripe splendor of New Orleans: the great homes of the Garden District, with their huge trees and ivied yards, and the long verandahs where the plutocrats sat in rocking chairs and drank gin fizzes; the rows of pastel shotgun cottages (ordered out of the Sears catalog), which filled the Irish Channel district and ran down Magazine Street in front of the wharves; the glorious depravity of the French Quarter, deeply anchored in history—but a history of pirates and voodoo and jazz. I walked the streets of New Orleans in a state of aesthetic liberation, every bit as much of an émigré as Hemingway in Paris, and feeling at one with him and with all the great American writers. For hadn’t they all stopped in New Orleans on their way to immortality—Whitman, Twain, Faulkner, Anderson, Williams, Capote—and which of them had ever passed a night in Dallas?
I was impressed right away that they sold beer in the five-and-dime and French wine in drugstores. Also, that I could buy it, a legal right I exercised with enthusiasm. In Dallas, when we teenagers wanted a drink, we would loiter outside a liquor store until we spotted some old black man in the parking lot. We’d give him five dollars for a case of beer and let him keep the change. In New Orleans liquor of all sorts was freely available and only marginally more expensive than tap water. A mixed drink at Larry & Katz’s, which was a half-finished shack where the clientele sat on upturned liquor boxes and the bartenders wore revolvers, cost twenty-five cents. It was a fine place to start the evening.
From there a person might wander over to Felix’s for oysters. In the too-bright fluorescent light, the oysters looked like puddles of mercury. Here in Felix’s you could see the classes converge, however briefly. There were handsomely barbered men and women in evening clothes, truck drivers in poplin uniforms with their names embroidered above their breast pockets, Tulane literature professors in tweed jackets with elbow patches, lawyers and criminals, doctors and patients, professional bowlers—all of them engaged in the singularly barbaric act of eating living animals by the dozen. You could close your eyes and place a person in his class by the sound of his language. The rich Orleanian has a slowed-down, muffled tone like a record played at three-quarter speed; I have heard the word “mayonnaise” delivered with so much nuance that it occupied the space of a sentence and arrived with its own internal marks of punctuation, rather like “My, uh … Nay! uzzz?” The most characteristic speech of the city is an urban dialect otherwise associated with Brooklyn and Hoboken, a “dems” and “dose” kind of talk that originated with the Irish laborers who were brought in to build the levees. When city people greeted each other they’d cry “Where y’at, ya muddah?” so college kids referred to townies as “where-y’ats” or just “yats.”
I became a food romantic. In 1965 New Orleans was one of the few American cities that took food seriously. Now, when there is scarcely a middle-sized town in the country without a representative sampling of international cuisine, as well as health food stores, specialty gourmet shops, fresh pasta, excellent bakeries, wonderful coffee, it is hard to remember how boring and desolate the American diet was. The only cookbooks on my mother’s shelf were Miz Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking and Fannie Farmer’s The Boston Cooking School Cookbook—both of them wedding gifts received by nearly every war bride in America. I grew up on meat loaf and mashed potatoes. When I was a child in Abilene, Texas, in the fifties, we would drive out to the local Air Force base after church to eat Sunday dinner—it was practically the only decent kitchen in West Texas. One of the great days of my childhood was when the first franchised restaurant came into my life: It was Kentucky Fried Chicken, and it caused a sensation. Now this was cooking! We went there every week and felt grateful, positively blessed, that Colonel Sanders would grant a concession to such a podunk town as Abilene. Even in Dallas in the sixties, Italian and Chinese restaurants were novelties. Pizza parlors were just catching on. The only exotic restaurant was La Tunisia, and its principal attraction was the seven-foot Negro who opened the door.
I spent part of my college career as a busboy and then as a waiter in one of the handsome small restaurants in the Quarter. My promotion was due entirely to my being the only busboy who owned a tuxedo. It gave me incredible pleasure to present the menus and watch the flushed, candlelit faces puzzle over the snapper versus the veal, taking those little internal soundings (“Do I feel like crabmeat tonight?”). I learned my way around the alleyways and kitchen doors that led to the secret chambers of Brennan’s or Antoine’s, where I might be dispatched to borrow a gallon of remoulade sauce. In the kitchens of those great restaurants were corpulent black men assembling dishes out of great troughs of condiments. I would dash back down the alley with the remoulade, up the rear stairs, into the kitchen, where I would pick up my entrées and walk slowly, with a sense of composure and purpose, into the dining room.
I had a hunger for bohemia. I wanted to see life raw and unpredictable. Later I recognized this as the Private School Syndrome—this idealization of the hard life, this romancing of the proletariat—but then it was all new and entirely original. I began to haunt the waterfront bars: the Acropolis, the Seven Seas, and particularly La Casa de los Marinos, a wonderful dive in the Quarter across from the Toulouse Street wharf, where sailors came to dance to Latin music and pick up college girls. French sailors were usually the most successful in this pursuit, owing to their tasseled berets, which were prized by the undergraduates of Sophie Newcomb College. For the most part, however, the students and the sailors didn’t mix; they crowded together in an uneasy emulsion of culture, language, and class.
Until I came to New Orleans I had never met an acknowledged homosexual. In Dallas we had spoken of queers, but no one I knew had ever spotted one—they were like Communists, an unseen menace. I was always hearing about the practice of “rolling queers” in Lee Park; in fact, I had the idea that homosexuals existed (if at all) only to sit on park benches and wait to be mugged by indignant teenaged boys. In New Orleans, however, there was an active, aboveground homosexual culture (the word “gay” had not yet been bent to this purpose), which was wildly dramatic and self-consciously humorous. The center of the scene was deep in the Quarter at a bar called Dixie’s. During Mardi Gras I would go there, safely ensconced in a phalanx of fraternity brothers, to watch the transvestite beauty contest at the corner of Bourbon and St. Ann. Some of the contestants were disconcertingly beautiful, despite the telltale Adam’s apples and powdered whiskers. One year a contingent of Marines from the USS Forrestal came swaggering past. They were all drinking Hurricanes—those giant tumblers of liquor from Pat O’Brien’s that usually signaled the drunken tourist. A moment later the Marines were on the stage with the contestants, hugging, kissing, groping, and quickly being hustled off into cabs. I wonder what they had to say to each other on the Forrestal the next morning.
It never occurred to me not to join a fraternity. Being a student was not yet the serious business it would become, and besides, I had an affinity for mystic societies and secret handshakes. By the time I graduated, fraternities had become passé, a redoubt for social reactionaries, but in 1965 we still believed, with Barry Goldwater, that “wherever fraternities are not allowed, Communism flourishes.” My lodge, Delta Tau Delta, was housed in two condemned buildings on Broadway, with no air-conditioning and with a plumbing system that backed up under the foundations. Our housemother was a fat, elderly woman who walked around with a dachshund tucked under her arm. She was as ribald as any of the brothers, but she always dressed for dinner, and we were supposed to mind our manners around her. One of the conceits of fraternity life, despite all evidence, is that it gives a man polish. I had to remind myself, when I was stepping over unconscious upperclassmen in order to throw up in the community toilet, that I was gaining advantages.
Your fraternity was supposed to say something about the kind of person you were. Indeed, there seemed to be an intuitive truth about this association of man and lodge that was not bound to a single campus. It was like a horoscope in that respect. The SAEs were campus leaders, politicians, snobs who spent their spare time buying golf sweaters. The Dekes were good-natured drunks. The Sigma Chis were serious, dull, marginal nerds. The KAs were unreconstructed Confederates. Once they planted cotton in their front yard and sent their black porter out with a gunnysack to pick it. During homecoming one year, when our football team was playing the University of Alabama, the KAs built a two-story papier-mâché Kotex box in front of their house, with the legend STOP THE CRIMSON TIDE. The Delts were known, universally and accurately, as party boys.
The biggest party of all was Mardi Gras. The carnival season lasted from Twelfth Night (January 6) until Fat Tuesday, the night before Ash Wednesday. In that space of time, which was sometimes as long as two months, depending on the date of Easter, the city rollicked in one long bacchanal. New Orleans society divided itself into krewes—Comus, Rex, Momus, and Proteus were the big ones, and the Zulus for the blacks—and they put on spectacular parades. First came the flambeaux dancers, black teenagers twirling flaming batons, doing a shuffle-step dance to the music of the brass band that followed; then came the floats sailing through the Quarter like galleons. On the last day of carnival the streets filled with a million drunks in makeup and costumes, searching for sin on the eve of the season of repentance.
One of my fraternity brothers, Arthur Wright, who was also from Dallas (but no relation of mine), rented an apartment on Royal Street for carnival. It was a cheap efficiency in an old Creole house with a single large bed and a bricked-up fireplace. Arthur and I came to furnish it one night before the big parades began, and we were surprised to find someone else living there. As a matter of fact, Arthur learned, the apartment had been rented to three different people during the past week. He received this information from the landlord in an angry phone call. The landlord said he’d be right over.
He screeched up to the curb on a motorcycle, with his wife sitting in a sidecar. She wore a white plastic overcoat and a turquoise hairnet. Her husband was a paunchy little Cajun with a leather jacket and curly black hair. “I ain’t gon’ ’pologize,” he told Arthur, “ ’cause I got you one far better dan dis on Bourbon Street. You gon lak it fine.”
We followed the landlord’s motorcycle down to lower Bourbon, well past the tourist zone into a darkened stretch of tenements. For two Dallas boys it was a little darker and more menacing than we were prepared for. I noticed right away, when we came into the courtyard, that there were no windows or doors on the apartments, just gauzy curtains and beaded portieres, through which we could see fleshy women and men in undershirts smoking cigarettes. In a pale orange room a naked man was playing the saxophone.
Now this is the demimonde, I was thinking to myself, as an adolescent Mexican girl came down the stairs wearing a sarong. “My mistress,” the landlord acknowledged. “Rita, bring me my blades.”
She nodded and went into a room, returning with a carved wooden box. Inside, encased in green felt, were a dozen throwing knives. The landlord’s wife stood against a wall fifteen feet away, with her arms spread in the crucifix position.
Whoomp! The first blade struck in the niche below her armpit. The mistress handed the landlord another knife and stood back to watch. Her mouth was partly open, and her tongue moved slowly across the edge of her upper incisors.
“I’m having second thoughts about this apartment,” I whispered to Arthur.
Whoomp! Other armpit.
“They certainly have a trusting relationship,” Arthur observed.
Whoomp, whoomp, whoomp! The wife stared unblinkingly as the knives tumbled toward her. Her husband finished with a nice flourish, placing the last blade an inch above her forehead. Arthur and I watched with maniac grins.
As the wife came away, leaving her outline pinned against the wall, I happened to see through her turquoise hair net. Half an ear was missing.
At last—real life!
There was a brief time in my life when my parents and I agreed on the music; it was the middle fifties, when Gisele MacKienzie and Dorothy Collins sang the popular songs on “Your Hit Parade.” Snooky Lanson sang “Davy Crockett” week after week, and I knew every verse. At night, when I was supposed to be asleep, I would tune into WWL from New Orleans and listen to the smart sounds of the big bands playing the Blue Room of the Roosevelt Hotel. Then Elvis Presley sang “Hound Dog,” and I began to give way to the tidal pull of rock and roll.
There was in my mind a certain suspicion that the music of my time would never be as sophisticated as that of my parents. Perhaps it was because their generation regarded rock and roll with contempt and bewilderment that the music became defiant. I remember being absolutely thrilled by the rumor that Gene Vincent had said “fuckin’ ” in “Woman Love”—although what he actually said was unintelligible. That the churches and the politicians were scandalized gave the music a political importance it had never aspired to have. I identified with the music, but I held back, too; it wasn’t all I wanted it to be. Even when the Beatles came to America in February 1964, singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You,” I didn’t surrender to them. They were okay, I thought, but I didn’t understand why the girls were screaming and the boys were suddenly growing their hair long.
The music hit me in 1966. I was walking into the University Center as Simon and Garfunkel were singing “Sounds of Silence” on the jukebox. The ambience was specific to me. The Mamas and the Papas sang “Monday, Monday.” It was the year when everything I heard seemed to be drawn from some generational oversoul, and I resonated without thinking or resisting. I had the feeling of being in a movie and every song I heard was part of my own soundtrack. It was a year when soul music broke through, at least for me. Percy Sledge sang “When a Man Loves a Woman” and Ray Charles sang “Cryin’ Time.” I had just discovered the great soul singers of New Orleans, Irma Thomas and Benny Spellman. How odd it seems, when I reflect on the music of 1966, that the number one song that year was “The Ballad of the Green Berets.”
In the fall of 1967 my roommate, Allan Denchfield, rigged his record player to a timer, so that every morning of the semester we awakened to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album. We couldn’t get enough of it. We listened to Leonard Cohen singing “Suzanne.” In the spring of 1968 the radio never stopped playing Otis Redding singing “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” Otis was already dead when that record came out, which seemed eerie then, although we soon got used to death being a feature of the music. I was eating crawfish in Eddie Price’s bar the first time I heard Janis Joplin growl the opening of “Turtle Blues,” and after that I always listened for the spot where her bottle of Southern Comfort shattered on the beat. Her sound was raw, insinuating, and powerfully ambiguous—neither black nor white, male nor female, but some revolutionary middle note between the races and the sexes. She was, it seemed to me, the Siren of our generation, beckoning us to the dangerous margins where death awaited.
The great object of college was not learning but sex. The sexual revolution may have been under way, but it was still unnamed and unacknowledged, and like all revolutions it started far away, on the sophisticated seacoasts, not in the Deep South. Here, one could only just now feel the moorings loosening on the Victorian Age. The girls of Newcomb College, Tulane’s sister school, were highly proper ladies. They were also as closely guarded as convicts after ten o’clock on weeknights.
There is something feral about the needs of young men, something well outside the boundaries of civilized behavior. We had all heard about the sophomore geologist so cramped from desire (“blue balls” it was called) that it required three men to carry him to the infirmary. Many nights I would stand outside the women’s dorm and find myself close to baying. Once, when I was standing there with a fraternity brother, and we had just returned our dates to the custody of their rooms, we decided to break into the dorm. I stood on my friend’s shoulders and was just able to knock on my date’s window, which she opened, quite obligingly. I crawled in and reached down for my friend, but as I was hauling him up a security patrolman grabbed his ankle. There was an awkward tug-of-war, which I lost. Then I heard the alarms.
It is a stupid feeling to be fleeing down a corridor to the screams of coeds, searching for an exit. All the doors were chained. I heard a commotion behind me, which I took to be the security patrol. I dove into a stairwell and nearly trompled a girl in curlers and a nightgown, whose mouth made a little o as I went flying past. I was in the basement, trapped, I realized, in the darkened laundry room.
How was I to know, as my pulse beat out a drumroll between the washers and dryers, that I was the last victim of the Age of Innocence? Liberation was riding to the rescue, but it would not reach me in time. I would be captured and returned to Dallas in disgrace (me, the once-promising student, led astray by boiling hormones). Or else—jail! Breaking and entering! My life in tatters! I heard the boots clumping down the stairs. I edged back into the shadows, and felt—a door. I hit it with everything I had. As I burst outside and fled through the shrubbery, I heard the sound of women cheering.
There was a constant search for private places. The college acted, in the phrase of the day, in loco parentis, and consequently unlocked empty spaces were rarely found and highly valued. Practically the only such places were the practice rooms in the music building; I spent several dates hugging and kissing under the legs of a studio piano. Sometimes, I discovered, the very most public places had privacy hidden inside them—the Newcomb auditorium, for instance, which was usually dark, lent an interesting theatrical setting to my frustrated sexual pursuits. Once, when the auditorium was locked, my girlfriend and I were drifting around campus and came upon Tulane’s famous stadium, where the Sugar Bowl is played. The fence was thirteen feet high, but we scaled it and wandered into the vast black space. There was a murmurous, echoing sound like a seashell held against the ear. Small slivers of light reflected around the elliptical tiers, ring after expanding ring. We felt ourselves to be in the center of the universe, we were all that existed, we were life itself. It is a memory that is recaptured for me every New Year’s Day when I watch the Sugar Bowl game and see the fifty-yard line, where I finally scored.
At Tulane we began to hear about the student movement against the war, but we were buried in the Confederacy, and the idea of protest seemed foreign and rather crackpot. Nonetheless, it happened that the first mass student protest in the South took place one midnight at Tulane in 1968, when 350 students marched on President Longenecker’s home to protest the censorship of two “pornographic” photographs in the school literary journal (one of the pictures was of a naked art instructor). We had no idea what to expect, or even how to go about staging a protest. A graduate student, a woman who had gone to Berkeley, stood up and told us what to do when the police came. “Link arms, then lie down like you’re dead,” she said. Of course, the police never came; in fact, no one noticed us at all.
That march was a small act of repentance on my part. The year before, I had encountered the first demonstration I had ever seen: a group of about fifteen students protesting the decision to hold the homecoming dance on board the President, the paddle-wheel steamboat that ported conventioneers up and down the Mississippi to the sound of white Dixieland jazz. It was a segregated boat. The management was making an exception to accommodate the Tulane student body, which included a very small number of blacks, and Dionne Warwick, who was going to perform. That seemed like progress to me—hadn’t we forced a change in the policy? The protesters wanted another site for the dance. They were standing outside the University Center with signs saying DO NOT SUPPORT RACIST INSTITUTIONS and NO STUDENT MONEY FOR SEGREGATION. I was walking from class with a friend, and we both thought of the same hilarious idea. We would protest the protest. We made a couple of signs, BAN THE BOMB and PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD, then we sidled up to the demonstration and stood there, trying to keep straight faces.
Some fraternity brothers came by and applauded. My picture was published in the student newspaper. There I am, with a smirk, in the last half of the sixties, on the cusp of the seismic changes that would characterize that era. All around the country protest was making itself heard, in the causes of peace, brotherhood, racial justice, but at that moment I thought it was something to ridicule.
The next week I went to pick up Dionne Warwick at the airport. I was the welcoming committee. I gave her a dozen roses and drove her downtown to one of the grand old hotels. She was the first black woman, other than my maid, that I had ever driven anywhere. She was charming and glamorous. I was completely enchanted. We talked about football. She followed the Philadelphia Eagles, who were playing the Dallas Cowboys that Sunday, and we made a twenty-dollar bet on the game.
When we got to the hotel there was a flurry at the desk. Suddenly they couldn’t find her reservation. It took me more than a minute to realize that the hotel was segregated too. Not legally, of course—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed—but in that insolent, closed-face fashion that says we never have a vacancy for black people. The bellmen hadn’t even bothered to pick up her luggage. Miss Warwick was standing there with her roses, and I saw for the first time that look—an ancient look of burned-out anger and humiliated pride. I suddenly felt sick about my idiocy of the week before. I had made fun of something I clearly hadn’t understood. That was the force of the repression for which I, being white, was responsible. The manager of the hotel came to the desk to deliver the excuse, but I cut him off. “You are about to make a terrible mistake,” I told him. “This is Dionne Warwick. Don’t you know who she is?” He looked blank. “She’s one of the most popular singers in the world. If you don’t give her a room, and a really good one, you’re going to be in every newspaper in the country tomorrow morning.”
He suddenly discovered a room key.
This was my only triumph for right and decency in my four years of undergraduate life. I never paid Dionne Warwick her twenty dollars, however (the Cowboys lost on Sunday).
I had come to New Orleans to escape Dallas, but I had not left the assassination behind me. The madness followed. New Orleans was Oswald’s city, his birthplace, and his spirit hung over the place like an evil spell. Soon New Orleans would be lit up in one of those queer American binges of lunacy, a paranoia of conspiracy that has been part of the national psyche since the Salem witch trials.
On Bourbon Street one day near the end of my freshman year I met Delilah, who would play a small but fatal part in the craziness to come. She was a stripper who did an Egyptian belly dance to “Hava Nagila,” the Hebrew song of celebration. She was clearly not reading the latest news from the Middle East. I introduced myself as a representative of Tulane’s Cosmopolitan Committee. One of the committee’s purposes, I explained, was to bring interesting cultural acts—such as hers—to the university. I had the idea of billing her as a “Jewish-Egyptian ethnic dancer” and letting her take off her clothes in McAlister Auditorium.
Delilah agreed to meet me at the club the following Tuesday, and at the appointed time I appeared. There was a Grayline bus tour parked outside, and the place was filled with Iowa chiropractors who were nursing their four-dollar drinks and watching Lynda Bridgette, the World’s Largest Stripper, shake her 378 pounds as the stage creaked and moaned.
“Delilah’s expecting me,” I told the barmaid in my best Peter Gunn style (I was eighteen years old).
“Oh sure.”
“No, really.”
She gave me a look that said this better be real, and went back to the dressing room. I took a seat. In a moment Delilah came out and shimmied through her big number. She had a shiny appendectomy scar that I hadn’t noticed before, but in the stage lights it seemed phosphorescent. Then, to the admiring astonishment of the Iowans, Delilah came to my table and ordered a Dr Pepper. She was in her mid-thirties, I calculated, or a little older—twice my age, in any case. She had black hair and olive-toned skin, which was probably the inspiration for casting herself as an Egyptian. However, she affected a Zsa Zsa Gabor accent along the lines of “Vere are you from, dahlink?” She was a walking cultural malaprop.
I admitted I was from Dallas.
“No kidding? Dallas?”
Her Hungarian accent fell aside and was replaced by the more familiar nasal tones of North Texas. I asked if she knew Dallas. “Yeah,” she said, “I know that goddamn town too well.” We sat quietly for a moment. Being from Dallas was an awkward bond to share.
“I used to work for Jack Ruby,” she volunteered.
She seemed to want to talk about him. He was a nice man, she remembered, but “a little crazy.” It was Ruby, the Jewish impresario, who put her together with “Hava Nagila.” Delilah gave me her telephone number, and I told her I would call next semester concerning her performance at Tulane. She said I could come to her apartment for “coffee.”
All summer long I thought about that invitation.
I was already alarmed at the direction my life was taking. When I fled Dallas for the university, I left behind a sweet Christian girlfriend. She had given me a Bible for my eighteenth birthday. “Cherish this book always, Larry, and diligently read it,” she admonished on the flyleaf, but I had fallen into the hands of the Sybarites and the existentialists, and when I returned to Dallas that summer I felt like a moral double agent. Half of me was sitting with my girlfriend in church, underlining Scripture with a yellow marker, and half (more than half) was scheming of ways to lead my little Christian exemplar into one of life’s dark passageways.
I was lying on her lap, with that thought in mind, watching the ten o’clock news, when a photograph of a black-haired woman in a belly dancing costume flashed on the screen.
“That’s Delilah!” I said, sitting up.
“What?”
“Shh. I know her.”
Her name, it turned out, was Marilyn Magyar Walle. She had just been murdered in Omaha, shot eight times by a man she had been married to for a month. Her association with Jack Ruby was noted. My girlfriend looked at me with an expression of confounded decency.
“Do you have something you want to tell me, Larry?”
I wasn’t the only one who marked Delilah’s death. The conspiracists were keeping a list of “witnesses” who had died since the assassination, a list that grew and grew. By February 1967 seventeen others had died, including two more strippers who had worked for Ruby (one was shot to death, the other was found hanging by her toreador pants in a Dallas jail cell). Most of these deaths were from natural causes or explainable under other circumstances, but in the aggregate they had a weight they wouldn’t have had by themselves. Seven of the victims had given testimony to the Warren Commission, six others had been interviewed by the Dallas police or the FBI. What are the chances, one might wonder, that so many people connected with the assassination would be dead in three and a half years? An actuary in London said the odds against all of them being dead in that time were 100,000 trillion to one—a figure that throws mysterious shadows across the otherwise unmysterious fates of car wrecks, failing hearts, jealous husbands, and disappointed suicides.
Like the majority of Americans, I wondered if the whole story had been told. Was there only one assassin on November 22, 1963? What about the Zapruder film, which seemed to show the President being shot from the front, not from Oswald’s angle in the upper rear? Were there other assassins on the grassy knoll? Was Oswald framed? There were enough unexplained questions in my mind that I was prepared to believe the New Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison, when he announced on March 1, 1967, that he had solved the case.
“Big Jim” Garrison was already a heroic presence in the city. He was a reformer with a New Orleanian sense of ethical balance. He had cleaned up Bourbon Street, which meant keeping the G-strings on the dancers and getting rid of the streetwalkers. He cracked down on gambling operations in Orleans Parish but left intact the sacrosanct pinball machines, which paid off at the rate of a nickel a game (I had several friends who went to school on a “pinball scholarship”). The big gambling syndicates fled next door, to Jefferson Parish, out of Big Jim’s grasp. Garrison had the reputation of a man who feared neither the moral zealots nor the local mob; he was tough, unbribable, cagey, unorthodox. Plus he had the power to issue subpoenas. He seemed to be the perfect man to solve the crime of the century.
What his investigation did, however, was to dip a ladle into the bizarre society of the New Orleans underworld, which was filled with mercenaries and mobsters, CIA agents, disaffected priests, and YMCA homosexuals. Somehow all of these creatures combined themselves in a single person, a man the district attorney called “one of history’s most important individuals.” Unfortunately, David W. Ferrie had already joined the list of the mysteriously dead.
Eastern Airlines had fired Ferrie as a pilot after he was arrested for a “crime against nature” with a sixteen-year-old boy. He had been a leader of the local Civil Air Patrol, which Lee Harvey Oswald joined in 1954. Robert Oswald suspected Ferrie of introducing his brother to Communism, but Ferrie’s politics seem to have been oriented in another direction. He once wrote a letter to the secretary of defense asking for an opportunity to “train killers.” “There is nothing I would enjoy better than blowing the hell out of every damn Russian, Communist, Red or what-have-you.” He may have been given his chance when the CIA drilled anti-Castro Cubans in the backwaters of Lake Pontchartrain. Ferrie later claimed to have taken part in the Bay of Pigs invasion.
On the day of Kennedy’s assassination, Ferrie was in a courtroom with his boss, Carlos Marcello, the godfather of the New Orleans Mafia, a man who had his own good reasons for wanting the President dead. The President’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had deported Marcello to Guatemala. (According to legend, Guatemalan authorities transported him to El Salvador, where he was dropped into the jungle wearing a silk suit and alligator shoes.) Ferrie supposedly rescued Marcello from the tropics and smuggled him back to the United States.
By any standards Ferrie was a peculiar person. He had a disease that rendered him completely hairless, a condition he tried to disguise by gluing orange tufts of hair, and sometimes even carpet scraps, to his scalp and to the place where his eyebrows would have been. He filled his apartment with thousands of white mice, on which he tested various cancer cures. He was also a pianist and a pornographer, and a bishop in a church in which he was the only member.
Garrison had developed information linking Oswald with Ferrie and a third man, known as either Clem or Clay Bertrand. However, on February 22, 1967, Ferrie’s nude, bald body was discovered in his apartment, some eight hours after he had been interviewed by a reporter for the Washington Post. An autopsy showed he died from a cerebral hemorrhage resulting from an aneurysm—natural causes, in other words—a diagnosis that was complicated by the fact that Ferrie left behind two handwritten suicide notes.
Ferrie’s death left Clay or Clem Bertrand as the only living member of Garrison’s assassination triangle. This person had been described to the county investigators as being a young homosexual, about five feet eight inches tall, with sandy hair. The man Garrison eventually indicted was a wealthy and aristocratic New Orleans businessman in his mid-fifties, six feet four inches tall, with stark white hair. His only real link to the case was that he was a homosexual and his name was Clay. Clay Shaw.
Shaw would spend the next two years of his life trying to clear his name. During that time New Orleans was Assassination Central. Every buff in the country came to town. There was an awestruck feeling that Garrison was peeling the lid off American society; it was as if he had discovered some further dimension of reality, as if he had found the point where parallel lines really did converge, where Ruby and Oswald and Ferrie and Shaw met the Cubans, the Russians, the Pentagon, and the CIA. And Garrison was amazingly self-assured. He gave long interviews in Playboy magazine and on the Johnny Carson show detailing the massive conspiracy. He confirmed every suspicion. “My staff and I solved the case months ago,” he said breezily. “I wouldn’t say this if we didn’t have evidence beyond a shadow of a doubt. We know the key individuals, the cities involved, and how it was done.”
At the heart of Garrison’s theory was the unoriginal notion that Dallas killed Kennedy; the city’s millionaire right-wingers financed the plot with the collusion of the Dallas police force and the technical advice of the CIA. These were the witches Garrison hunted. There was also the fashionable idea, added later, that Kennedy was murdered by the military establishment so that it could wage unrestrained war in Vietnam. What made Garrison’s investigation so appealing is that he satisfied the profound paranoia of the moment by saying yes, it’s true, and it’s worse than you thought. Somehow that news came as a relief.
Many of the assassination buffs came to speak at Tulane. New York attorney Mark Lane entangled the Warren Commission in lawyerly webs of contradiction and intrigue. Comedian and activist Dick Gregory spun spooky scenarios of universal government control. He invited us to give a round of applause to the federal agents in the audience tonight, and we cheered ironically, glad to throw aside our naïveté. That was the first time anyone had ever suggested to me that the government thought students were worth keeping an eye on.
When Clay Shaw finally came to trial, one of the witnesses against him was a Baton Rouge insurance salesman, who said in advance he planned to lie on the stand (because he didn’t like Shaw’s attorney). Another witness was a heroin addict who said he was sitting on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain, shooting up, when he saw Clay Shaw talking to Lee Harvey Oswald. My favorite prosecution witness was a New York City accountant who had heard Shaw planning the execution of the President. The accountant also admitted that he had been hypnotized frequently—against his will—usually by New York City police officers who were engaged in a Communist conspiracy against him. Part of their scheme was to substitute “dead ringers” for his children during the night, a plot he foiled by fingerprinting his kids every morning at the breakfast table.
New Orleans was the laughingstock of the nation. The conspiracy movement had been gathering energy for years; lightning was bound to strike somewhere, and New Orleans was a natural target. There was a feeling that this travesty could only have happened here, in Oswald’s hometown, with a cast of characters only New Orleans could offer. Like Dallas, the entire city was made to feel responsible, an unfair charge that was still too appropriate to deny.
Clay Shaw, who distinguished this episode with grace and humor, died of cancer soon after his acquittal. He had been one of New Orleans’s most respected citizens, the managing director of the International Trade Mart, the author of many plays, an expert on Restoration period architecture, whose hobby was rehabilitating French Quarter homes. In World War II he had won the Legion of Merit and the Croix de Guerre. He was a political liberal who had voted for John F. Kennedy. He died, vindicated but ruined, a victim of conspiracy paranoia, queer baiting, and the political ambition of an unscrupulous, and perhaps insane, prosecutor.
For a while it seemed that every conspiracy theorist in the country was working out of Garrison’s office. Afterward they scattered in disgrace, with Clay Shaw’s reputation, and possibly his death, on their consciences. Of course they later realized that Garrison’s investigation had been just another clever scheme to discredit them. It was all part of the great conspiracy, all evidence of witchcraft.
In my sophomore year I fell in love with a redheaded girl who smoked a pipe. I was snaring freshmen for my Cosmopolitan Committee at an open house when Tamzon Feeney walked into my life (as they say in the romantic novels), wearing black stockings and a beige jersey dress. She was as tall as I and more strongly built; I found out later, to my faint disgust, that she had put the shot for a Catholic girls’ school in San Diego. Her hair was cut short and combed into bangs, to disguise an unusually long forehead. Her eyes were hazel, and too large; her nose was pug, and too small. She had the usual freckled pallor that accompanies red hair. She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.
There was always about Tamzon an alluring innocence, a part of her nature that the nuns had nearly trapped into a convent, but there was another part that was ready for anything. I never knew anyone who was less afraid of life. While other freshman girls stood about properly cowed and demure, Tamzon entered the room with a look in her eye that suggested she had just gotten shore leave. She watched me for a moment—I was surrounded, for once, by women—then she walked out of the room.
When people say they fell in love at first sight, they usually mean that they saw themselves in another person. What I recognized in Tamzon was a romantic attachment to life that was even greater than mine. We had both suffered restraint in our backgrounds—she by Catholicism, I by growing up in Dallas—but in us that restraint had acted like a drawn bow; when we met we were both in the full flight of release. That was what I saw in her eyes: that there was no dare she would not take, that her life would be lived all the way through—and to hell with convention! On the other hand, I knew from the moment she walked into the room that her hunger was greater than mine, and when she walked away I must have known that she was going to have to break my heart.
She was seventeen. Like many people with excess brains who have raced ahead of their peers, she was oddly immature, and got by largely on bluff and humor. Her most profound secret was that she believed she was called to greatness. She was going to be another Albert Schweitzer or Dr. Tom Dooley. As a result she saw her time in school as a last fling before she disappeared into the jungles and surrendered herself to good works.
On our first date I took her to the French Quarter. Although I had been in New Orleans for only a year myself, I presented the Quarter to Tamzon Feeney as if it were a living thing and mine to give. I took her to Preservation Hall to hear the old black jazzmen; we paid a dollar at the door and sat on the floor, and we could feel the music pounding right through the floorboards and up our spines. This was an obligatory stop for me, although the jazz was fossilized and I felt, as I sat inside the ring of white people in the audience, all of us grinning and tapping our toes, that we were attending a Negro zoo. Afterward, Tamzon and I walked down Chartres Street, to the Napoleon House, the bar of my dreams, a dim old place with dark stains on the wallpaper like Rorschach blots, and a phonograph at which customers picked through the records and played, let’s say, “Bolero” or “L’Elsire d’Amore,” but the volume was only just loud enough to draw a curtain of sound between the tables, and every table floated in its own isolated pool of candlelight. Redheads are always more beautiful at night, especially in candlelight. A hard look at noon and the colors are all wrong—the hair’s gone orangish, the skin is vividly freckled but also translucent and veiny, a kind of 3-D skin—but night brings out the redness and the complexion falls into focus. Here in this atmosphere of excessive romance we told each other about ourselves.
“I am surrounded by hypocrites.”
“I know, I know.”
“Life is too valuable to be wasted on fools.”
“I’m going to change the world.”
“I’m going to save it.”
Then we laughed a little at our pretension, but the terms were stated. We had been alone forever. We had cultivated our alienation, but we had believed that no one would ever understand us, or even care to. Until now. We looked at each other with relief, and fear.
“Let’s get out of here.”
I decided to test her. We went for a drive on the levee, where I often went in marginally suicidal moments when I wanted to peer over the edge of life. I owned a 1955 MG roadster, and because it was red, and because the model number, TF 1500, had her initials in it, Tamzon saw it as a kind of chariot for her personality. We put down the top and then lowered the windshield, and the breeze hit us smack in the face. I had never taken a girl riding on the levee before. I turned off the headlights and navigated by moonlight. It was dangerous and famously illegal, but Tamzon was whooping as we flew over dips and bumps. The filthy Mississippi snaked along beside us, filled with gleaming chemicals and the slow commerce of freighters. Then we parked and lay on the grass and listened to the tugboats blast. I was afraid to touch her. Male and female suddenly felt like animals living in different elements, I in the water and she in the air. I thought how strong she was, and how avid. I was already terribly afraid of losing her.
A cop stopped me on the way home. I had forgotten the time—Tamzon was late, she would be punished—but instead of giving me a ticket for speeding, the cop took pity on our predicament and gave us an escort all the way back to Tamzon’s dorm. When I walked her to the door and asked for a kiss, she burst into tears.
I entered college at a time when the tide of revolution was just beginning to break across the campuses of the nation. I did not picture myself as a part of that tide. I knew that I was part of the Baby Boom, but I had not understood how my generation, by force of numbers, would change the political and cultural life of our nation. I had not seen how society was already arranging itself to accommodate youth. It was part of the solipsism of my own youth to believe that my teenaged taste for hamburgers, for instance, would naturally find expression in the rise of fast-food outlets all over the country, just as my sexual desires would batter down barriers of conduct, and my political beliefs, aimlessly acquired, would change the course of historical events. All of my interests and needs and whims and predilections had enormous consequences, because they were characteristic of millions like me. But I didn’t yet understand myself as part of this mass. I didn’t foresee our power. I was pleasantly cloistered among the great stone buildings, eager to shut out the world of adults and the world of children, and happy to live among my peers, aged eighteen to twenty-two, in a sort of sexual rhapsody of serious talk and giddy uncoverings and long dizzy afternoons of Kierkegaard and Jax beer.
News reached us nonetheless. Richard Speck, the failed scholar of Woodrow Wilson High School, murdered eight nursing students in Chicago. Charles Whitman, the nation’s youngest Eagle Scout, climbed into the tower at the University of Texas and shot forty-four people, killing fourteen. One of the injured students was a high-school classmate of mine. I watched a ceremony on the Quadrangle for the widow of the first Tulane graduate killed in Vietnam. It reminded me that university life was a parenthesis, enclosed on either side by the draft.
But I was in love, and enjoying four years of deferment, and it seemed absurd to worry that this “brushfire war” would be waiting for me on graduation day.