So Texas I abandoned, the prospect of being a historically in-tune, enviro-friendly, twill-clad, post-and-beam architect no longer troublesome. That’s what I thought to do, so in Atlanta I stopped to interview with the other guys, in order to decline the opportunity to join them and be a historically out-of-tune, enviro-blind, twill-clad, skin-and-skeleton architect. The interview was thorough. Four of the not senior fellows took me out, they could drink, we wound up after hours looking for an open club, we found one, it was gay, we ordered up, and I am greeted heartily by the General — the president of the small college in which my mother teaches.
He says, taking me by the shoulder as if to lead me somewhere and show me off, “Whoa! Whoa! I didn’t know!” He’s the picture of mirth — country-club camaraderie and thigh-slapping. What on earth do you make of this earth? A man who has hounded friends of my mother out of jobs for their alleged homosexuality — on the strength of seeing me, recognizing me from not much more than a few conversations with my mother, with me at her side, years ago — feeling me, kneading me, steering me through a hundred leering, winking guys who know a bit more than I do, it would seem, about him. I start laughing and find no way not to go along with the General’s presumptions and gumption. There are raised eyebrows at the bar where my interviewers are suspended, not yet tasting their drinks, wondering now how good an idea coming with hot young prospect Simons Manigault into a place called the Golden Flame was.
17
THERE, IN A GAY BAR, at one in the morning, being watched by my red-blooded interviewers with their eyebrows irrepressibly raised as the college president for whom my mother teaches paws me, I have a vision of sorts. It is of the lover of my mother whom I called Taurus, who was ostensibly not a white man altogether, who went apparently to Louisiana when he was done with my mother or when she was done with him. I have left enough women to know that the matter is never clear: even if one party drops off the key, Lee, and the other merely weeps, there has been some crossfire, however muted, and there has been some leveraging out on the part of the left. But at one in the morning in the Golden Flame, I see only my man Taurus, sitting in a bar, a different kind of bar, with knotty paneling and room for only ten or so serious fools, in Louisiana, with a bright yellow fizzing beer in a six-ounce straight glass and an expression on his face that is inscrutable. And I am going to Louisiana. Where I have no business, but I have no business with the General’s ham-sized paw kneading my shoulder and forcing me, eventually, to go back to my escorts and feign sheepishness and explain this. No. When I get this vision of Taurus, a man singular in the long unsingular run of suitors to my own mother, I have the courage to walk back to the T-square technicians who call themselves artists and ask, “Gentlemen, you fellows ever tried the true stuff?” They freeze — not able even to blush, let alone snort. “Until you do, it cannot be explained.”
I know it will be explained at the office the next morning, in high hilarity and close-call head-shaking sighs. Their discomfort is marginally amusing. Not amusing enough. The General, in his large, loose presumption, is better company than this small, tight presumption of the professionally-taking-itself-seriously.
I spend a night in a giant glass tower of the sort they would have me draw for a living and observe from my window, at intervals, the construction of a receiving awning and the cordoning off of a two-block area by a profusion of at least three kinds of police. Checking out the next morning, I learn that the President is coming for a stay. May he be gay, too.
I stop around the corner at a liquor store — I do not mean to go into Louisiana unarmed — and witness what I take to be a scene, but the players don’t apparently regard it as much. A black man stumbles into the store and is denied a purchase — I miss whether he has no money or whether he has been deemed too drunk to buy more booze. As this denial obtains in his brain, he begins to huff and rumble, finally managing something like, directed at the black clerk, “Fuck you up.” The clerk says, “Go on.”
“Bsht!” A stagger and a wave that is then, from its momentum only, known to have been a swing at the clerk.
“Get out of here.”
“Fuck you up!”
“I’mone tear you up, nigger,” the clerk says, untying his apron.
That does it. The denied eases out, bumping from jamb to jamb, and the store is back to business as usual. I notice that I am the only customer among five who is white and who has been holding his breath. The others have formed a line ahead of me with their purchases, impatient. I watch the clerk scrupulously to see if he regards me or my transaction any differently from the others, and he does not. Where I come from there would have been apology or dismissal, explanation or gesture made to accommodate me, to persuade me the drunk and the vulgarity were exceptional. Or during the fracas, the clerk might say “Buckra heah.” Here, no. Atlanta is on its own, I take it, racially, and it is the only thing I witness in it that argues I stay. But I do not stay: they are already goosing each other about me in the suites of Eco, Ergo and Ague, and I am going to Louisiana with a banjo on my knee.
Do I expect to find this man? Why, excepting that it is absurd to do so, should I not? Have I not seen my careerist peers panicked by prospect of homosexual contagion, my non-careerist non-peers not panicked by prospect of physical violence, my President panicked by prospect of assassination, when all he wants is a quiet room at the Omni? Is it more absurd to think to find one mysterious man who, as I recall him, was not panicked by anything, in half a million panicked men in Louisiana? Not absurd enough.
I drive a long time. If you prefer old federal highways that are drained of blood by parallel interstates, they are happily drained also of asphalt, and you click and clunk and click down them slowly enough to study the shells and hulls of cinder-block motels and bars clinging to them like cicada husks to moribund trees. I wind up in desolate region in desolate hour, with no motel in sight, and then finally there is one. The breath I hold against No Vacancy turns out to be fanciful when the clerk, a black woman, chuckles, “Sure there’s room,” and I wish immediately maybe there had not been. There are about ten rooms, with most of the doors open at one in the morning and couples in them managing to look at me, led by my key to No. 8. They are all black. The looks are bothered, not uncivil, but containing curiosity run over quickly by resentment. Resenting what, I no longer am naïve enough to wonder. Nor do I wonder how I graduate from the black liquor store and its business to this black whorehouse (as near as I can hazard) with its business — you get in grooves in life, and you by God stay in them until the record plays out. So be it. What I do wonder is why so many doors are open for them to see me, as if each couple is expecting more company, if it is actually couples in the rooms (you have, with your circumspect glance as you watch ostensibly your own feet, time to see only a drink or a bottle, a man or a woman, a hand, a look, an earring, a mustache, another look). I close the door to my room. A card on the table says “Latesha,” like that, in quotes, and then, also in quotes, a phone number.
I call my mother. She’s asleep. Otherwise she would not cooperate.
“Mother.”
“Son.”
“That man I called Taurus, your …”
“My friend.”
“Yes. Where is he?”
“Where is he?”
“Yes.” I expect her to disclaim, fight, dodge, vituper possibly. The interview of one’s mother on the subject of her lovers is not indelicate. My timing — her being nine-parts asleep (agreeable) and one part her true self — allows purchase.