There was a strike in Rome, and I walked carrying those cats two miles to the state vet to get the proper papers. Then I walked to the American embassy to get them notarized. I had a portfolio that was given me. Well, great is the power of the shipping lines. When I got to the travel agency, they had called two motorcycle cops to escort me to the boat. Nobody looked at any papers. Somebody stamped my passport. That was all. I went roaring off with a motorcycle escort right to the steps of that boat. Then this black man helped me with the luggage because I was holding the cats. He said, “Are you going to America?” I said, “I’m going home to Mobile.” “What’s your name?” “My name is Walter.” “Did you folks live on Bayou Street?” He was born two blocks south of Bayou Street. Crazy: the interconnectedness of it all. I had thirty days’ worth of food because I didn’t know what they would serve us on the boat. I wasn’t about to be caught in the mid-Atlantic with something inedible. Thirty days of wine, thirty days of typing paper and a typewriter, thirty days of drawing paper and watercolors. When I got to Marseilles I learned that the ship was not going to go to Mobile as planned; it was going to Texas. I got as far as—whatever the port in Texas is. I had to buy another passage from there to Mobile. So I drifted up the St. James River. Went to all kinds of fascinating places, up the Mississippi River, and then home.
Of course, in some ways it was hard leaving Rome, but not as hard as you would think. The cats and monkeys, you see, they do get around. They always meet again. I mean, when they really have bus service to the moon, I imagine getting off that bus and seeing George Plimpton and Federico Fellini and Leontyne Price, and we’ll say, “Oh, what are you doing here?”
Epilogue: Mobile, Again
T
he city of Mobile had lent me a house that had been lent to them. They didn’t have enough money or help to restore it. I was to have ten years there in exchange for restoring it. It had been inhabited by vagrants and it smelled like a piss pie. Every single window was broken. So I went to work getting all my stuff in there and I did a lot of restoration. Then Hurricane Frederick came and blew everything up.
My cats were in it with me, the two beloveds who came with me from Rome. I spent a lot of time crawling around putting out buckets and moving books, moving books, because leaks sprang everywhere. At one moment the wind was so great on the east side of the house that a window suddenly just blew open and the rain came into the front room and I had very quickly to move a lot of things and then crawl on the floor with a hammer in mouth and nails to get under that window where the wind was coming in. The screen
was like a green stained glass window because there were so many leaves
smashed against it. I finally could reach up and first nail one side to the bottom of the window and then nail the other side.
It blew from something in the morning till very late that night. Of course, there was no telephone, there was no electricity. I had thought of putting the cats in the closet under the stairs. They wouldn’t go. The minute it started they got under the carpet in the hallway. So I took an easy chair and put it in this middle hall right in the middle of the house and poured my Jim Beam. Finally I just went to sleep. I woke up with this big crash, so I made myself another drink and sat there and then heard another big crash. And I thought, “Well, I’m bored with it.” So I moved my bed from where it was closer to the inner wall and went back to sleep.
I found out when I got up in the morning that the magnolia tree was the second crash I’d heard. It had cut right across the front porch against the front door. I couldn’t get out the front door. And half of an oak tree in the yard had taken the back porch off and was against the back door, so I couldn’t get out of either door. The most amusing thing: There was this cat that lived in the yard that I adopted. He’d once lived in the house; the couple who owned him moved away, and a year later he came from somewhere back to this house. When I first got into the house he was this skinny old tom. Actually he was a chartreuse, and a good one, all gray with green eyes. Beautiful cat.
By the time I fed him up he was pretty gorgeous. I always fed him on the back porch; he came precisely at nine every morning. He came out from under the house at dawn the next morning after Frederick when the wind had stopped. He totally ignored the fact that the back porch was not there. He climbed up the oak tree and clawed up the screen to the kitchen window, and he said, “Meow, Eugene, meow. What’s for breakfast?” He ignored the hurricane totally.
I’d put everything I could into the freezer compartment. The guy across the street always had his deep freezer full, so after about eight days he was desperately giving presents all around the neighborhood. He gave me a ham that was still frozen. I just put that thing in the freezer, and that was my block of ice for another two days. I had several dinner parties as soon as I could find a way for people to get around the magnolia in the front and the oak in the back. My friend Nell Burks was coming back from Atlanta, and she thought, Oh, who knows what things will be like for them there? She stopped off someplace like Greenville on her way back down and bought candles and ice. She arrived and banged on my door. She came in, and I was having a dinner party. There was this elaborate meal and all these candles everywhere, because I keep bottles of water, bottles of wine, and boxes of candles, always. As a child of the hurricane, I always have basics. And colored paper to cut out for games.
*
All that with moving in and the hurricane was such a complication that I didn’t notice anything at first. I had not realized how much the bulldozers and the Baptists had destroyed in the three decades I’d been away. The Baptists really are the greatest menace to art and culture. When the soldiers and sailors were off fighting World War I, and those temperance ladies finally got through the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, that was the beginning of the end of downtown Mobile. The great restaurants—they were world famous—closed when they couldn’t sell wine. That’s when my cousins’, the Schimpfs’, restaurant closed. When I was three or four years old, I saw the last gasp of old Mobile, which was basically European before the First World War. Downtown was twenty-four hours a day. There were bordellos and all-night cafés and waterfront cafés with embossed iron ceilings. The great restaurants were bar restaurants. The ground floor was a saloon with a free lunch. If you had enough drinks, you got a free lunch from the buffet. Help yourself. One of the great things was pickled eggs, which is one of those forgotten dishes. There was every known seafood because a pound of shrimp cost about a penny then. All the theatrical people—Sarah Bernhardt, James O’Neill, father of Eugene—couldn’t wait to get to Mobile.
All the theater people loved Mobile because it was Catholic and European, and after all the famine they’d gone through in America, they loved to come to Mobile and have a good meal. That’s why Mobile was a great theater town. And people in Mobile went to the theater every night. Curtain at nine and dinner at midnight. All those places had midnight dinners. But that Mobile died when Prohibition came in. The great restaurants couldn’t make money when they couldn’t sell drinks. Some of them survived as places that sold oyster loaves, but only two or three of them. And when the great restaurants closed, the theater people didn’t want to come to Mobile.
I will never forget, when the news came that Prohibition had been repealed, Mobile went on a three-day drunk. There was a three-day carnival in Mobile. All that stuff that had been in the back closet and under the house came right out in the open. Everybody went into their hiding places and brought out everything, and pop, pop, pop, pop, pop went the corks. The streets flowed. Go downtown; no shops were open. There was a two-week hangover. I mean, we have to remember Christ’s first miracle. Why do you think he turned water into wine? He did it to help people, especially people past a certain age.
But then in the Second World War, all those peasants from the fields came to work in the shipyards.
Forbes
magazine said that Mobile was one of the towns that grew the most during World War II. And those peasants did not go back to the fields when the war was over. They stayed in town and built Baptist churches on every corner. The temperance movement and the Baptists have destroyed Mobile totally. So what was once a Caribbean ward has become a white-trash city. What was once a European port is now a Baptist colony.
To me, World War II is really the great frontier; it started the vulgarization of everything. That’s when people downtown were all getting old. Everybody younger was off to the war, and they were renting out empty rooms. There was a citywide appeal from the Red Cross: If you have a room you can rent out, please do, because we have an airfield and a shipyard, and we need a place for these people who’ve come to town to work for the war effort, as it was called. So many places had partitions put up and rooms divided. Things sort of got run-down. And where everybody had a patch of something, some tomato plants and herbs, in the backyard, that just all stopped in the Second World War. Downtown went dead.
What’s really got to me since I’ve been back is that Bienville Square, which had formerly been like a street salon, with everybody downtown on Saturday, was absolutely empty. Nobody is downtown on a Saturday. And that was for me like a party, a street party, on Saturday, downtown. I remember one Saturday when I came back taking a walk in Bienville Square. There was nobody in there. And I thought, Oh, my Lord, what’s happened? I mean, most pleasant cities do have markets and bookshops and a street life and a kind of “Here we are.”
And so many of the grand, glorious buildings on Water Street had been torn down to make places with lots of small efficient offices. They had been commercial buildings, except they were made like Baroque masterpieces. You know,
baroque
is from a Portuguese word meaning “misshapen pearl.” When people began to do art and architecture that was not classical, that is not even on each side but has curves and all that,
baroque
was the word they chose for it. When I use it, I usually mean Southern exuberance and a delight in ornament. Disliking a flat façade in people, animals, trees, houses, works of art. It is natural for human beings to like baroque, especially if you live in a climate where the sunlight is hard and clear. That’s why modern buildings vanish on the Gulf Coast. Some of these modern buildings that you might see if they were in Denmark or Hamburg just vanish in Mobile. You cannot see them. They are blanks. You could pass them three hundred times and not notice them. They’re not there. Because the vegetation is baroque; the people are baroque; everything is baroque. So what’s a perfectly plain box going to do on Water Street?
And so many houses I had known as a child, and known the people who lived in them, were simply not there. It was a great shock to go to the corner of Conti and Bayou Streets and see this little-prick Baptist church covering every inch where my grandmother’s house used to be. I mean, right to the sidewalk, this cement building with a tiny steeple. Have you ever noticed how the Baptist churches have the smallest steeples?
And a great many trees had been cut down. I mean, they had just been cut down. Those primitive types with low foreheads have just gotten loose, and too many things have been bulldozed. They’ve cut down all along Government Street magnificent huge old oaks and old magnolias and planted those sappy little things that don’t mean anything. Mobile once had a better climate; it was so covered with trees that it was not so hot then as it is now. If you stand for a minute on the sidewalk where there are no trees, then go stand under the oak trees on the sidewalk, you will instantly notice six or ten degrees difference. If all the things they cut down were still here, you wouldn’t feel this heat. A full-grown oak gives out something like two hundred cubic feet of moisture. It’s Mother Nature’s air-conditioning. And the protection of many kinds of wildlife. But the balance of nature has been destroyed in the name of the dollar. Not to mention the people who destroyed downtown so they could sell their swampland in west Mobile and have malls, malls, malls.
And there has been a whole change of atmosphere. The idea of enjoying life has faded. The nine-to-five world has made it to Mobile. In Europe there is still not any idea of the nine to five, where an ambitious young man or woman has to have their personalities compartmentalized into waking up, quick coffee, then nine to five. And then you get drunk after the pressure of the day. Maybe you have sex, maybe you have theater, maybe you read a book at night. But you still have before you that drawbridge. The nine to five. I mean, theoretically, offices have schedules in Europe. But it’s understood that schedules are kind of like a fence; inside you can grow any flowers or vegetables you like. Here it’s a barbed-wire fence to the cement ground.
In Europe they have an idea that you’re going to have to work hard if you’re going to have anything, if you’re going to eat, if you’re going to have any comforts on this planet. You’ve got to work. It’s just taken for granted. But it’s not a religion. Europeans will stop anything to see something extraordinary in the street, or if they see an old friend, they go to a café to have a drink together at once. They go to the office at eight and stop everything at eleven to have a drink at the café. Then they have lunch. Then, along about two or three, they go back to the office. That’s not true in America. Not true even in Mobile, although everybody used to go home for what was called dinner and then a nap. In the old days, when it got hot, you would hear guys say, “Well, I’ve sweated through my seersucker. I guess it’s time to go home.” They put on a fresh seersucker suit in the morning, and by twelve or one o’clock they had sweated through the armpits. So it was time to go home. Too hot to work. Finished for the day. And they got everything done. They got all their work done by ten in the morning. Then an hour of male gossip at the coffee shop or just sitting on the wharf or in the cool produce house. At eleven go back to the office and maybe write a few letters, do a few phone calls. Start home at eleven-thirty for midday dinner. Afterwards a nap, and when it was starting to get a little better, like at four, back to the office for an hour or so and close up and start home. Just like Italy. They got everything done, and nobody was ever in a bad temper. They walked slowly, because we were always told, “Don’t get hot. Take it easy. Don’t run. Walk. Take your time.” They weren’t rushing out in their cars and fighting for a parking space. They were walking slowly and seeing what was out there. But since World War II there has been air-conditioning and regular hours. You don’t leave early, and you don’t come in late. Eight to five. Ghastly in a climate like this. It’s not possible. It’s against human nature. While in the tropics, why fight them? Go along with them. But somehow the easy approach to life has ended.