(From Fear and Loathing With Bill and Tom in NYC)
Dressed in a suit and tie, dragging my 30 lb DART teaching machine and a briefcase, I hailed a cab to get from the Holiday Inn to the Random House offices. However, the driver refused to leave until I said the street name correctly. I had violated one of the Manhattan protocols for giving directions to cabbies. Once that was done, he was friendly.
Standing on the sidewalk looking up at the Random House building, I felt like Youngblood Hawke (the southern writer from the Herman Wouk novel who tries to make it big in New York City). I was greeted by an old man who reminded me of the cabby. His office was in an out-of-the-way corner and about the same size as the interior of the cab. He too ended up being kind, but without hope...
...Writers Who Couldn't Write
It was 1980. We were conducting an exit interview at Burroughs on the fourth floor of the old Charlotte Merchandise Mart (not far from Briar Creek, where elderly people fished for crappie off the little pedestrian bridge, and next door to my office where Jones showed up the last time before disappearing into legend).
Johnny, the Documentation Manager, sat behind the desk and smiled sympathetically. He looked like John Denver, but more ironic. As the Writing Supervisor, I sat beside the woman and expressed concern by steepling my fingers under my chin. I’ve been told that I looked crazy back then. I was probably smoking.
The woman said something like, “You are non-professional and vulgar. You are never serious and you turn everything into a joke. You are very depressing. That is why I am leaving. You are making me negative.”
(Three Wise Men of Documentation - the sort of juvenile expression that bothered the woman.)
She closed by noting, “And you are smug, although I don’t know what you’ve got to be smug about.”
Johnny told her, “I’m sorry you feel that way. You are wise to leave.”
I offered, “Well, good luck.”
Except for the non-professional part, she was probably correct in everything she said.
What she didn’t get, what most of the other writers did get, was that we were very serious about the work. We cared about the writing...
...Travels with Big Daddy and Other Adventures
(Big Daddy)
On my second day with the company, sometime in 1971, I flew with Big Daddy to Chicago to visit Sun Electric, a large manufacturer of automotive test equipment. I was supposed to talk to the technical people while Big Daddy regaled the executives.
On the trip up, I was the recipient of Big Daddy’s attention. Wattles red and tremulous, heavy lidded eyes drilling into my already shaky sense of self-worth, he told me what had happened so far at Sun. He also told stories about his own experiences as a flyer in WWII (like the one about his last flight when he turned to his co-pilot as the plane was going down the runway and said, “here you fly”) . I was nervous and every half hour or so made a toilet trip down the long aisle of the Eastern Airlines jet. Just before we landed, when I returned from my last trip to the head, Big Daddy leaned over and said to me, “Harumph. By the way son, you don’t have a kidney disorder, do you? Ha ha.”
...Last One to See Jones (complete story)
(Jones)
I heard second or third hand that Warntz, Wade’s photographer, saw somebody downtown who resembled Jones. But old winos shuffling by with long stringy hair and downcast eyes tend to look alike. Warntz supposedly said that even if it was Jones, he wouldn’t have known what to do. That was in the early 1980’s.
The last time I saw Jones was in 1979. I was working for Burroughs at the Merchandise Mart on Briar Creek. We were within walking range of East Charlotte high society where Jones was living in the walk-in closet of Mark The Beast (a gentle beast, as Jones was always quick to point out).
I had already introduced Jones to my fellow writers. We had been to a couple of lunches and he had dropped by the office a few times. Never sure of my own cool, I bathed in Jones’ unwashed cachet. (It worked out a lot better than the time back at Cardinal when I set him up with Mary, a writer I knew from the English program at UNCC. Although about the same age, 50 or so, each said the other was too old. I now wonder if both knew that Jones was past any kind of normal relationship and for some reason neither wanted to puncture my persistent naiveté by pointing out that obvious fact.)
But this time there were no complaints. Jones performed his naughty professor role, flirting with the young documentation women, offering outrageous comments in a gravelly voice that always seemed to hide something (good or bad, depending on your point-of-view). I probably told everyone about his law and English degrees and that his father had been a judge and that his brother was a state archivist. He might have mentioned, making it sound romantic, how he lived for a year in the basement of the Cardinal building, across from the Morehead street YMCA.
It was about 9:00 AM the last time he showed up. I was sitting in the five-by-seven office I occupied by virtue of being the documentation pseudo supervisor. We were on a public hall so he had no trouble getting in. I might have heard the light footsteps, or smelled the feral odor before seeing the shaggy head poke around my door.
He probably said, “Hey Whup!” (Using the name he gave me back at Cardinal when I was editor of the literary journal, Livermush.)
I probably replied, “Hey Perfesser”, and directed him to the yellow plastic guest chair that Treplow had salvaged from his kitchen – one chair each for him, Johnny and me.
While chain smoking a handful of my cigarettes and gulping at least three cups of coffee, heavily laced with sugar and creamer, Jones told me his latest story. Mark, for reasons that weren’t clear, had finally decided to reclaim his walk-in closet. Jones was headed downtown to a homeless shelter. He had not had anything to drink in several weeks, not because he didn’t want to, but because he was out of money. This enforced sobriety might have been the reason that he seemed so sharp and full of energy, despite the way he looked and smelled. However, something else seemed to be going on. It was as if a burden had been lifted from his narrow shoulders. He seemed free.
After a half hour or so, he left. Maybe I told him I had to get back to work. Although it never seriously crossed my mind to take him in, to save him, I did give him ten dollars and most of my cigarettes. Walking with him down the hall to the elevator, I probably said something phony like, “Take it easy. Be careful. Come back if you need help.” He told me the first thing he was going to do, before going to the shelter, was get some beer.
Opinions differ regarding what happened next.
This is my vision.
Jones is lying under a bridge abutment. He has come here to die. In the evening traffic noise he hears Siegfried's Funeral March from Götterdämmerung. He is attended by three street people, who only know him as the “Perfesser”. One kneels at his head, the other at his feet, eyeing his shoes. The third is a woman, unrecognized as such by her other companions, but known to Jones. She bends over him. He sticks his hand up her grimy shirt, reaching for what remains of her breast. She bats his hand away. He grins and dies. They strip his body and leave him to be consumed by rats and other creatures that he once described as living at the interstices of the city.
Wm P has different view.
Yes, Jones was the wino that Warntz saw. However, Jones’ brother, the archivist, came to the rescue. He took Jones back to Raleigh and against all odds and all logic, the Professor decided to straighten himself out. (It was always within his power.) I’m not clear about the final resolution of this vision, but it could be that Jones went to work for his brother and is still there, a hale and hearty octogenarian daily visiting the bowels of government, living happily ever after. He hardly ever talks about his life in Charlotte and never speaks of us. It is, he says, a time of ghosts.
That is also a nice story.
..."Art" from Burroughs Period
(DC3 Bird Flying Over Yucatan)
(Humpidus Tractorious)
...Lunch Walks
We see a huge black dog, like a wolf, hunched on the crest of the hill. We call him Ghost Dog and wonder if he has acquired a taste for rancid old technical writers. When I walk out into the field, the dog stands up and my companions tell me to come back.
