Padgett Powell - Edisto

Well, it’s bold because against her league I look like Spanky McFarland trying to have a word with Marlene Dietrich. In fact, I chicken out altogether. I can’t even phrase anything for a foot in the door. But fortune of fortunes, she gets on our bus one day, heads right to the back, and holds court. Now this is entirely another class of thing than a Diane Parker selling peeks. You get the idea she would think that kind of thing cheap or childish. When I get back there to sidle in, the guys are saying she should get off at their stops or come home to play cards or something, saying it very smoothly.

"I’m not playing no strip poker with you guys," she says. The you creates an image of other guys.

How did she know they meant strip poker? That’s what they’re all trying to figure out, I think, when she seizes their indecision and delivers a wallop worthy of a woman who has had a baby out of wedlock in a state reform school.

"Do you guys know what it’s like to eat a woman?"

They don’t. They all get these strong, silent looks on their faces except one, who smiles. He figures, I think, that this is so far beyond the pale, so far beyond, say, getting a long look at things in a poker game that they don’t even have to pretend to know. So he says very candidly and calmly, "No, we don’t.” And then, "So tell us what it’s like."

She thinks a minute, purse on her shoulder, and says like Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke would say to a table of ruffians before Matt got back: "It’s like sucking mayonnaise through a Brillo pad."

This had quite an effect on the ruffians. On me, too. My investigations had gone far enough for the time being. I stopped this kind of questioning forever, and had a strange kind of respect for that girl, and still do.

A Time Like Sweet Potatoes

There’s been one positive positive about all this going-to-be-a-writer bull-hockey, and that is what our most famous playwright helped me get away with. Researching Habits and Methods for me the Doctor discovers that he gets up at three o’clock and makes coffee and plays rock and roll and writes, still writes plays. Well, a master sets a precedent and it is available for all the trials of posterity. And I am posterity.

It gets outlawed on school nights is the only thing. And I modify two ingredients at least. Three a.m. is perfect — he got that right. The house is kind of horror-movie still, settling itself for the night yet, and the wicker furniture is silently crisp; the Doctor is retired from the labors of lion’s Kool-Aid and snoring on her side when I pull her door shut. Wind is whistling the sand, and surf chomping like a roaring crowd, but it is somehow very quiet all the same.

Coffee I change to this recipe: I put just enough instant coffee in to give an adult look to milk and drink that. I think it’s the smell of coffee people like anyway, which you get, this way.

And rock and roll. A big thing has happened there. The dramatist meant something like Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis on those Tennessee Sun records when it was really black music in white hands or something — he can’t mean The Strawberry Alarm Clock. Old Presley the truck jockey in his leather jacket and natural sneer violating teenage girls within range of his voice — something like that helps him write. Not "Time" poems by a spoken voice in a group called The Moody Blues. Maybe the closest thing going to what he meant was this Jim Morrison cat, who a very correct know-it-all at school with all these appointments to play his clarinet at ladies’ parties told us was arrested in Miami for "masticating" on stage.

"Tobacco?" I said.

"No-o. Masticating," he said, like I was a dunce. Well, I was and I wasn’t, because if you look it up, "chewing" is about as close to meaning something as "manipulating." And when you’ve had one of these mayonnaise questionnaires backfire on you, masticating will suffice. So I have no real idea what Morrison did, even though I know the word, but anyway, he’s dead.

So I skip it, the rock and roll, and tune in one of these weather-farm-fishing shows where the guy sounds like a very young grandfather, and in two hours you know whether to cut tobacco or go fishing or stay in bed, and you have this cozy feeling because a grandfather like that is free, and useful to all of us. He talks about Russians and crime and rain, and his voice never changes. Someone calls in that 139 Soviet spies are registered in D.C. and the F.B.I. does nothing about it, and someone else calls and says 139 channel bass were landed at Botany Bay, and it’s still 5: 35 a.m. in WQUE country, and Pop’s very charming and full-sounding. It’s probably some skinny guy with a big Adam’s apple and bad skin, but he sure sounds like a green-and-black mackinaw and a pipe.

My other modification is a hamburger. I don’t know what it is, but I make a hamburger all the way, and down it and get wired. You have to fry it hard to get this chewy black crust on it, and singe the bread in the pan too, and heavy onions and mustard, and this at three-thirty in the morning is different than at any other time — it really gets me. All this, the farm news and the burger and the fake coffee, isolates you, but it ratifies you too, so that for a while I am lord of the manor, looking up and down the coast as if I were proprietor of the Atlantic herself or governor of all rumrunners. This is also when I write stuff. (Or used to. I’ve about quit all the other crap except this assignment.)

The 3 a.m. time is kind of like potatoes for corns on your feet — not for everybody. You can imagine who could do it and who couldn’t conceive it. Now the Doctor couldn’t personally, but it has its writerly vocational recommendations, so she lets me, but even she doesn’t realize the regimen it’s got to, the ritual of it. And if Daddy were here, I am sure it would be sufficient cause for another round at the pedi-shrink, where they took me because they thought I was retarded.

They did this little number with my knees and a hammer to make me think it was a regular visit and pumped up that armband job, which I thought was to test my muscle. Well, I bought it. So when the doctor says, "Simons," very slowly, "I want you to tell me what a few things are," I said okay.

“What’s an envelope?" he asked.

"It’s a thing you eat for breakfast," I popped.

This queer color went through everybody’s face like heat lightning, and I knew something was wrong. So I thought, in the way you can if you’re three years old and they’re scudgin’ you, very hard about my answer and the question, and it didn’t fit right, not quite, even though I thought they should have given me some points for speed. Very sharply I slapped my forehead and said, "What am I doing, failing!" And that reversed the heat lightning, calmed the waters of worry. No kid, master of the Boy Act at three, could, they figure, be retarded. So I was off. But it left an imprint. They didn’t trust me. I knew. Nor I them.

I found out later it was the Doctor took me there, not the Progenitor. He thought I was regular for three, but she had to see if I could ever learn to read. Well, it’s true I couldn’t tie a shoe or stop wetting the bed, but those Golden Books never gave me a problem. And then it was on to all these award children’s books about contemplative rabbits, and llamas that talk and go both ways, which I didn’t know at the time was preparing me for faculty parties.

And then it was on to the Library itself, my bookwalled bassinet, and the great stuff. Now, some of it’s pretty good, but I spent a lot of misdirected energy being disappointed by titles, like I told you, things like The Screwtape Letters, which I thought was a transcript of tapes about you-know-whatting. Anyway, smelling the coast in that gently howling pagoda at 3 a.m. got me to thinking about things that were going on. In a way, the house would tell me how to study things. The surf said more at a distance than up close. I was governor of the rum-runners inside the house, at a remove from the action, but outside I was a kid getting wet from the spray of the waves. Still, it seemed that things were happening, but when I looked squarely at them, I wasn’t sure.