First of all, it was an urban college, its campus brick, stone, and asphalt; nary a blade of grass to remind a student of suburbia, small-town repression, or cornball life back on the farm. Most of its classes were taught (many still are) in former private homes, grand old three-story houses resplendent with ornate staircases, cupolas, balconies, and bay windows convenient for checking to see if the Yankees were coming. Secondly, it was a professional school, which is to say there were no required courses in English, math, or a foreign language. From day one a freshman was immersed in his or her chosen field -- and frequently that field was art, drama, or music. Degrees were offered in advertising and retailing, in journalism and fashion design, and its department of social work had a wide reputation, but it was its curriculum in the arts that gave RPI its flavor, a flavor unsuited to everyone’s palate in Richmond, one of the most proper, conservative cities in America.
RPI did not field a football team, not a single fraternity or sorority Greeked up the place, and it should go without saying that there was no dress code: “conventional dress” at RPI meant whatever the alley cat dragged in, and the La Bohème chic on display invited the city’s gentry and good ol’ boys alike to deride the school as a haven for degenerates of every persuasion. That characterization, as exaggerated as it was, only made the place dearer to the hearts of many students, for little encourages a bohemian more than to be misunderstood and maligned by squares. RPI had suited William Fletcher Jones and B.K., both alumni, and it was to suit me, as well, when I enrolled there soon after leaving the air force.
RPI’s student newspaper was called the Proscript, and I never knew what that meant either, although the name somehow made more sense than the Ring-tum Phi. In any case, I became editor in chief of the Proscript, and wrote a weekly column I entitled Walks on the Wild Side as a kind of tribute to Nelson Algren, arguably the greatest American novelist of the twentieth century. Like each and every Virginia school, private or public, RPI, for all of its air of nonconformity, was racially segregated. As protest, I and two of my fellow staffers on the Proscript, Pat Thomas and Ginger Foxwell, went to great lengths to sneak integrationist messages into the paper, and while some of them were so clever as to be almost entirely esoteric, we were nearly always caught.
As a result of this subversion, I was reprimanded with a C in journalism, which though it torpedoed my “straight A” average, didn’t ruin my chances in the job market. In fact, for most of my senior year I worked a full forty-hour week on the sports desk of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the state’s leading daily paper. Like all morning papers, the Times-Dispatch was produced at night. I worked from four in the afternoon until midnight, which is how I managed to carry an eighteen-hour class load despite full employment. It was a bit of a strain, however, and I was as happy as any kid in junior high when the school year finally ended.
Commencement exercises at RPI were slated for 10 A.M., and due to my schedule, I was of a mind to skip the ceremony, reasoning that I could profit more from sleep than walking across a stage for a perfunctory handshake and a parchment diploma. My pal Ginger Foxwell objected. She wanted like-minded company at the event. And when I claimed that I simply wouldn’t wake up in time to dress and make it to the civic auditorium (whose name, believe it or not, was the Mosque), she countered that she would send a friend by my apartment to rouse me and drive me to commencement. Sure enough, at nine-fifteen or thereabouts on the fateful day, there was a rapping, a tapping at my chamber door, and though Edgar Allan Poe had once called Richmond home, I was pretty sure it wasn’t a raven. Indeed, the figure my bleary eye saw through the peephole was a bird of quite a different feather.
Patricia was radical Ginger’s unlikely best friend, a married woman from suburbia. I’d met -- and been beguiled by -- her a month earlier when, after accepting a ride home from a party (I’d yet to replace the Kaiser), I’d ended up in the backseat beside her as the driver took his passengers on an inebriated joyride up and down the streets of the Fan. Patricia and I had chatted jovially, perhaps to conceal nervousness at the insane way the driver was taking corners, and when the car finally squealed to a stop at my address, we’d impulsively, unexpectedly kissed. It was intended to be casual, just a sociable good-night buss -- but then the world might be a different place had Madame Curie discovered a new method for making cheese fondue rather than a recipe for radioactivity.
At the meeting of our lips, peacocks went into hiding, elephants suffered memory loss, camels developed a maddening thirst, and dinosaurs long thought to be extinct turned up on the evening news.
It could not have lasted for more than four or five seconds, yet this commingling of mouth meat, this musical clink of enamel against enamel, this slippery friction (for some reason always as startling as it is intimate) that occurs when tongues collide (surprise!) was epic, mythic, even biblical in its scope. A person could imagine seas parting, bushes burning, angels hovering, milk and honey flowing from a stone; imagine wheeling chariots, strikes of ancient lightning, and the lamb lying down with the lion in a field of crimson poppies. Those kissing such a kiss, transformed momentarily into a hairy god and a naked nymph slurping nectar from the same full cup, could imagine it lasting forty days and forty nights, though as indicated, it was over so quickly that the parties kissing could not be wholly certain it ever happened.
Now, weeks later, here Patricia stood in my doorway, dolled up in her go-to-commencement finery and wearing a smile that managed to be simultaneously timid, awkward, and seductive. In the time that elapsed as we stared at one another there, I could have received a half-dozen diplomas, a haircut, and a citation for loitering. Then, our heads bobbed toward one another, back and forth, like wary pigeons pecking at an ear of corn, until after a couple of near misses we connected and kissed for the second time that spring.
Patricia had married at sixteen, and now at twenty-two had three lovely children and a nice home in a lower-middle-class suburb. She also had a hole somewhere inside, down which a significant, formative, irreplaceable chunk of her young life had gone missing. Of course, in retrospect, that sounds like I’m making excuses for her. As for my own part in this, I must confess that when Moses threw that stone tablet at me -- the one in which the Seventh Commandment had been plainly etched -- I ducked and it sailed out the window.
Oh, I felt pangs of guilt all right, but I’d recently taken to reading Zen texts and while reading Zen is akin to reading swimming (in both cases one must eventually toss aside books and just leap off the dock), I was learning the wisdom of living in the moment. Moreover, in my moment of wavering hesitation, I could hear ol’ Billy Blake shouting all the way from the eighteenth century, “Kiss the joy as it flies.”
Suffice to say, I never made it to my college commencement. Due to graduate with honors, I chose dishonor instead, earning a postgraduate degree in adultery. Summa cum lotta.
The “Fan” in Fan District refers neither to the manufacture of those rotary appliances used to circulate air in enclosed architectural spaces nor to the handheld accessories whose primary function it is to cool down, and conceal the facial twitches of, overheated dowagers. Rather, it’s named for the way streets fan out in a radiating semicircle from Monroe Park, a green if soot-peppered oasis in the urban center of Richmond. It’s an old neighborhood in, by American standards, an old city, though one sumptuous with block after block of beautifully restored town houses, and enlivened by the student population of Virginia Commonwealth University (formerly RPI), along with the sort of shops and watering holes that cater to students; as well as to the artists, gays, and bohemians who have both enriched and stigmatized the area for decades.
When I think of the Fan, which I seem to persist in doing, I think primarily of its alleys. As charming as are its leafy streets, lined with renovated homes and almost audibly tramped by the ghost boots of long-dead Confederate officers, it is the alleyways dividing those streets that are responsible for the romance in my Richmond reveries. The images and moods most a
ssociated with the word “alley” -- narrow, secluded, gritty, generally unlit, and often dangerous passageways populated by emaciated tomcats, garbage trucks, and thugs -- do not entirely apply to the alleys of the Fan, which to this day are simultaneously inviting and forbidding, elegant and squalid, ominous and suffused with grace.
What one notices first about alleys in the Fan is that they’re cobblestoned, an antiquated method of paving that grants them a quaint old European quality -- and when moonlit, an illusion of being studded with golden marshmallows (giving rise to thoughts of sweet-potato pudding -- or Oz). Next, if the season is right, one is likely to discover how sensuous, coquettish even, an alley can be, for these Fan alleys are lined with fragrant honeysuckle, climbing roses, dogwood, lush magnolia, and showy va-va-vooms of violet wisteria: sufficient allure to distract the eye from rubbish cans and the nose from spots recently favored for baptism by urine.
Further, what makes the Fan alleys unusual if not unique are the little two-story carriage houses one passes every twenty yards or so along one’s route. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gentry kept their buggies and horses on the ground floors of these adjunct buildings, while the upper floors were living quarters for servants. Nowadays, the ground floors typically garage bicycles and sports cars, while those above are rented out as studios for painters, sculptors, poets, and musicians.
The alleys become all the more interesting after nightfall, when they softly resonate with stray disembodied fragments of music (live or recorded), intellectual discourse, dog-bark, couple-squabble, and woo-pitch, not to mention the even less tangible secrets that seem to seep from the shadowed crannies, the walled gardens, and the back bedrooms of the decorous houses that face city streets with feigned nonchalance, as if oblivious of, or at least indifferent to, the eccentric little rivers of alley life -- incongruously cultured, intermittently raw, and potentially threatening -- that course stealthily behind them.
On many a hot, sticky summer night, when a restless Richmond felt like the interior of a napalmed watermelon, I’d leave work at midnight and walk the alleys of the Fan until dawn, half expecting Patricia’s armed husband to leap out at me from every spooky nook. On my nights off (Tuesdays and Wednesdays), I’d hang out at Eton’s, playing Ella Fitzgerald’s recording of “But Not for Me” (my God, what an elegantly poignant tour de force!: it makes self-pity sound like a refined condition, makes the lovelorn feel like a noble tragic hero rather than a poor dejected sap), over and over on the jukebox until closing time (also midnight); then commence my cobblestone ramble, occasionally with fellow alley enthusiasts for company.
At some point in late 1959, Eton’s abruptly fell out of favor (maybe it had just become too fashionable) and the hip scene (except for the gay boys) moved almost en masse diagonally across Grace Street to the Village Inn, a funkier joint run by amiable Greeks who made fine submarine sandwiches and had never heard of Ella Fitzgerald. (The Village also had a jukebox, of course, but the record selection, lacking the advantages of superior gay taste, was less sophisticated, its amplification poor, and it quietly starved to death for lack of quarters.) My friend B.K. was now renting studio space atop a carriage house in the alley directly behind the Village, and it was in that studio that “the Baboon Family” gave its one and only, though locally legendary, performance.
It was on a Wednesday evening in 1961 that B.K., his diminutive powder keg of a girlfriend, Mary Lou Davis, and I were moping around in his studio, bored, broke, and feeling in sore need of alcoholic stimulation. It wasn’t long before the solution became obvious. We stripped naked, painted our buttocks liberally with red acrylic, and climbed up in the carriage house’s large wooden rafters -- after first having torn pages from B.K.’s sketchbook to make hasty flyers (See the Baboon Family, 10 o’clock, Admission 25 Cents), which we persuaded a passerby, a good-natured acquaintance, to distribute in the Village.
Word spread. By ten-fifteen a sizable crowd had climbed the outside stairs to gawk at the red-assed “baboons” who, gibbering, grunting, and scratching themselves, were cavorting among the exposed beams overhead. The problem next became how to get people to leave. It’s tiring being a faux baboon.
After an almost excruciatingly long time, however, the novelty (I hesitate to say “excitement”) wore off. Spectators, many muttering and shaking their heads, filtered back to their booths, bar stools, and beers; and B.K., Mary Lou, and I descended, finding more quarters in our admission jar than the Village jukebox swallowed in an average month. After washing off our bumptaratums and getting dressed, we were able to go buy a bottle of cheap champagne, which we sipped in a celebratory mood, like actors toasting their success after opening night of a hit Broadway show.
Maybe it’s not unusual that a struggling artist and an aspiring writer who’d yet to find his literary voice would paint their butts red and cavort nude in public, but why, you might wonder, would a nice young Southern girl participate in such a shameless display? Well, you would have had to have known Mary Lou Davis (aka the Human Wrecking Ball) -- and had you lived in the Fan District in the last half of the twentieth century, you very well might have known her.
Mary Lou looked harmless enough. She was petite, as I’ve said, and rather attractive (long brown hair, fiercely expressive eyes, slender waist, and one of those up/down, up/down seesaw rumps from the Marilyn Monroe Memorial Playground); although in middle age she came to physically resemble the nickname she earned by her propensity for breaking up marriages, friendships, bank accounts, and attempts at serious conversation. The real surprise, I suppose, is not that she would grow over time to look like a wrecking ball but that, after numerous suicide attempts, accidental overdoses, falls, catfights, screaming scenes, and brushes with the law, including six months behind bars (Mary Lou wasn’t just a drama queen, she was a drama empress, a tumultuous Cleopatra barging down a Nile of trouble), she actually survived to reach middle age. She didn’t live past it.
In any case, she was a reasonably cute young thing from a respectable family down in slow little peanut-flavored South Hill, Virginia, when she arrived in Richmond to enter nursing training at Stuart Circle Hospital. It didn’t take her very long (it must have been some perverse kind of homing instinct) to discover the Fan District, however, and then it was good-bye bedpan hello bedlam. Late one afternoon not long after moving to the Fan, she strode into Eton’s, placed her hands on her hips, looked around the crowded room and asked, loud enough to be heard over the chatter and the jukebox, “Anybody here want to fuck?”
To appreciate the full impact of that brazen invitation, the reader must realize that in the fifties the so-called f-bomb really did have an explosive quality, and it was never, ever detonated in public. I mean, there were elements in America still reeling from Clark Gable’s having uttered “damn” at the conclusion of Gone With the Wind. Nowadays, “fuck” reverberates quadraphonically in every multiplex in every mall in the land, and supremely untalented comedians compensate for lack of wit by using the word at least four times per punch line, all of this thoroughly robbing the once-forbidden expression of its deliciously nasty sexual power. Prior to Mary Lou, I had never heard a female say “fuck,” even in private, and I was twenty-six or twenty-seven at the time.
Well, for a long full minute, it was as if a paralyzing gas had enveloped Eton’s. Nobody moved, nobody spoke. Then, the gay men commenced to titter, and the straight guys -- those unaccompanied by girlfriends or wives -- started to steal looks at one another in a peculiar, nervous, searching way as if to see who, if any, among them would answer or at least nod in the affirmative and make to accompany Mary Lou out the door. I’m unsure if anyone did. At least not immediately.
My own reaction was to fish some quarters from my pocket, go to the jukebox and play “But Not for Me” three or four times in a row. That, I suppose, was my answer to Mary Lou’s shocking solicitation. She, definitely, was not for me. When I was working construction, one of the older workers (they were inclined to give m
e advice) imparted this bit of wisdom: “Your ideal woman, the one you’ll wanna hold on to, is the one who’s a perfect lady in your living room and an outright slut in your bedroom.” Whatever the reader may think of this sagacity, of its political correctness, I must confess it resonated with me. In Asia, even the bargirls I hung with were demure when in public, and the contrast between their outward modesty and the manner in which I knew they’d behave once the shoji screen slid closed and the futon unrolled, was a torch to the fuse of my libido. For some of us, I guess, primness with the veiled promise of wantonness is just about irresistible.
No, I never found Mary Lou the least bit sexually desirable, not even when she was stark naked (of course the fact that her rear end was brake-light red at the time and she was gibber-jabbering like an agitated ape possibly contributed to my chaste response); but as a friend -- and we did become quite friendly -- she could be as entertaining as she was challenging. After she broke up B.K.’s marriage (she was a dedicated home wrecker but, hey, every girl needs a hobby), the three of us would go to lengths to keep ourselves amused in fusty old Richmond, for there were nights when even the Fan District was steeped in ennui.
One of our routines developed after B.K. came into possession of some theatrical greasepaint, including professional-quality clown white. We’d make ourselves up to a level that would have passed inspection at the Ringling Brothers Clown College. Then, dressed in our everyday clothes, usually sweaters and jeans, we’d go downtown to the Trailways or Greyhound bus station, find seats in the waiting room -- sometimes together, three in a row, sometimes widely separated -- and sit there nonchalantly reading a magazine or newspaper. That is, we’d pretend to read while keeping an eye on people in the crowd (a lot of folks still traveled by bus at the end of the 1950s) to gauge their reaction, a response that varied from open delight to feigned indifference, though the most common reaction was bewilderment. And while I didn’t share Mary Lou’s devilish glee in fostering confusion, I must confess that I’ve long tended to regard the interruption of complacency as a kind of public service.