The Lost Continent (9 page)

This so surprised me that I answered, in a cracking voice, ‘Pardon?’

‘I said how yew doin’?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. And then added, having lived some years in Britain, ‘Thank you.’

‘Y’on vacation?’

‘Yup.’

‘Hah doo lack Miss Hippy?’

‘Pardon?’

‘I say, Hah doo lack Miss Hippy?’

I was quietly distressed. The man was armed and Southern and I couldn’t understand a word he was saying to me. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I’m kind of slow, and I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

‘I say’ – and he repeated it more carefully – ‘how doo yew
lack
Mississippi?’

It dawned on me. ‘Oh! I like it fine! I like it heaps! I think it’s wonderful. The people are so friendly and helpful.’ I wanted to add that I had been there for an hour and hadn’t been shot at once, but the light changed and he was gone, and I sighed and thought, ‘Thank you, Jesus.’

I drove on to Oxford, home of the University of Mississippi, or ‘Ole Miss’, as it’s known. The people named the town after Oxford in England in the hope that this would persuade the state to build the university there, and the state did. This tells you most of what you need to know about the workings of the Southern mind. Oxford appeared to be an agreeable town. It was built around a square, in the middle of which stood the Lafayette County Courthouse, with a tall clock-tower and Doric columns, basking grandly in the Indian summer sunshine. Around the perimeter of the square were attractive stores and a
tourist information office. I went into the tourist information office to get directions to Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s home. Faulkner lived in Oxford for the whole of his life, and his home is now a museum, preserved as it was on the day he died in 1962. It must be unnerving to be so famous that you know they are going to come in the moment you croak and hang velvet cords across all the doorways and treat everything with reverence. Think of the embarrassment if you left a copy of
Reader’s Digest Condensed Books
on the bedside table.

Behind the desk sat a large, exceptionally well-dressed black woman. This surprised me a little, this being Mississippi. She wore a dark two-piece suit, which must have been awfully warm in the Mississippi heat. I asked her the way to Rowan Oak.

‘You parked on the square?’ she said. Actually she said, ‘You pocked on the skwaya?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay, honey, you git in yo’ car and you makes the skwaya. You goes out the other end, towards the university, goes three blocks, turns rat at the traffic lats, goes down the hill and you there, un’stan?’

‘No.’

She sighed and started again. ‘You git in yo’ car and you makes the skwaya—’

‘What, I drive around the square?’

‘That’s rat, honey. You
makes
the skwaya.’ She was talking to me the way I would talk to a French person. She gave me the rest of the instructions and I pretended to understand, though they meant almost nothing to me. All I kept thinking was what funny sounds they were to be emerging from such an elegant-looking woman. As I went
out the door she called out, ‘Hit doan really matter anyhow cuz hit be’s closed now.’ She really said hit; she really said be’s.

I said, ‘Pardon?’

‘Hit be’s closed now. You kin back arond the grounz if you woan, but you caint go insod.’

I wint outsod think that Miss Hippy was goan be hard work. I walked around the square looking at the stores, most of them selling materials for a country club life-style. Handsome, well-dressed women bounded in and out. They were all tanned and rich-looking. On one of the corners was a bookstore with a magazine stand. I went in and looked around. At the magazine stand I picked up a
Playboy
and browsed through it. As one does. I was distressed to see that
Playboy
is now printed on that awful glossy paper that makes the pages stick together like wet paper towels. You can’t flick through it any more. You have to prise each page apart, like peeling paper off a stick of butter. Eventually I peeled my way to the main photo spread. It was of a naked paraplegic. I swear to God. She was sprawled – perhaps not the best choice of words in the context – in various poses on beds and divans, looking pert and indisputably attractive, but with satiny material draped artfully over her presumably withered legs. Now is it me, or does that seem just a little bit strange?

Clearly
Playboy
had lost its way, and this made me feel old and sad and foreign, because
Playboy
had been a cornerstone of American life for as long as I could remember. Every man and boy I knew read
Playboy
. Some men, like my dad, pretended not to. He used to get embarrassed if you caught him looking at it at the supermarket, and would pretend that he was really looking for
Better Homes and Gardens
or something. But he read it. He even had a little stash of men’s magazines in an old hatbox at the back of his clothes closet. Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men’s magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kids knew all about. Once in a while we would swap our dads’ magazine among ourselves and then imagine their perplexity when they went to the closet and found that instead of last month’s issue of
Gent
they now possessed a two-year-old copy of
Nugget
and, as a bonus, a paperback book called
Ranchhouse Lust
. You could do this knowing that your dad would never say a word to you about it. All that would happen would be that the next time you went back the stash would be in a different place. I don’t know whether women in the 1950s didn’t sleep with their husbands or what, but this dedication to girlie magazines was pretty well universal. I think it may have had something to do with the war.

The magazines our fathers read had names like
Dude
and
Swell
and the women in them were unappealing, with breasts like deflated footballs and hips of abundant fleshiness. The women in
Playboy
were young and pretty. They didn’t look like somebody you’d meet on shore leave. Beyond the incalculable public service
Playboy
performed by printing pictures of attractive naked women was the way it offered a whole attendant life-style. It was like a monthly manual telling you how to live, how to play the stock market and buy a hi-fi and mix sophisticated cocktails and intoxicate women with your wit and sense of style. Growing up in Iowa, you could use help with such matters. I used to read every issue from cover to cover, even the postal regulations at the bottom of the contents page.
We all did. Hugh Hefner was a hero to all of us. Looking back now. I can hardly believe it because really – let’s be frank – Hugh Hefner has always struck me as a kind of an asshole. I mean honestly, if you had all that money, would you want a huge circular bed and to spend your life in a silk dressing-gown and carpet slippers? Would you want to fill a wing of your house with the sort of girls who would be happy to engage in pillow-fights in the nude and wouldn’t mind you taking pictures of them while so occupied for publication in a national magazine? Would you want to come downstairs of an evening and find Buddy Hackett, Sammy Davis Jr and Joey Bishop standing around the piano in your living room? Do I hear a chorus of ‘Shit, no’s’ out there? Yet I bought it whole. We all did.

Playboy
was like an older brother to my generation. And over the years, just like an older brother, it had changed. It had had a couple of financial reversals, a little problem with gambling, and had eventually moved out to the coast. Just like real brothers do. We had lost touch. I hadn’t really thought about it for years. And then here suddenly, in Oxford, Mississippi, of all places, who should I run into but
Playboy
. It was exactly like seeing an old high school hero and discovering he was bald and boring and still wearing those lurid V-neck sweaters and shiny black shoes with gold braid that you thought were so neat in about 1961. It was a shock to realize that both
Playboy
and I were a lot older than I had thought and that we had nothing in common any more. Sadly I returned the
Playboy
to the rack and realized it would be a long time – well, thirty days anyway – before I picked up another one.

I looked at the other magazines. There were at least 200 of them, but they all had titles like
Machine-Gun Collectors,
Obese Bride, Christian Woodworker, Home Surgery Digest
. There was nothing for a normal person, so I left.

I drove out on South Lamar Street towards Rowan Oak, having first made the square, following the tourist lady’s instructions as best I could, but I couldn’t for the life of me find it. To tell you the truth, this didn’t disturb me a whole lot because I knew it was closed and in any case I have never managed to read a William Faulkner novel beyond about page three (roughly half-way through the first sentence), so I wasn’t terribly interested in what his house looked like. At any rate, in driving around I came across the campus of the University of Mississippi and that was much more interesting. It was a handsome campus, full of fine buildings that looked like banks and courthouses. Long shadows fell across the lawns. Young people, all looking as healthy and as wholesome as a bottle of milk, walked along with books tucked under their arms or sat at tables doing homework. At one table, a black student sat with white people. Things had clearly changed. It so happened that twenty-five years ago to the very week there had been a riot on this campus when a young black named James Meredith, escorted by 500 federal marshals, enrolled as a student at Ole Miss. The people of Oxford were so inflamed at the thought of having to share their campus with a ‘Niggra boy’ that they wounded thirty of the marshals and killed two journalists. Many of the parents of these serene-looking students must have been among the rioters, hurling bricks and setting cars alight. Was it really possible that that kind of hate could have been extinguished in just one generation? It seemed unlikely. But then it was impossible to imagine these tranquil students ever rioting over a matter of race. Come to that, it was
impossible to imagine such a well-scrubbed straight-arrow group of young people rioting over anything – except perhaps the number of chocolate chips in the dining-hall cookies.

I decided on an impulse to drive on to Tupelo, Elvis Presley’s hometown, thirty-five miles to the east. It was a pleasant drive, with the sun low and the air warm. Black woods pressed in on the road from both sides. Here and there in clearings there were shacks, usually with large numbers of black youngsters in the yard, passing footballs or riding bikes. Occasionally there were also nicer houses – white people’s houses – with big station wagons standing in the driveways and a basketball hoop over the garage and large, well-mown lawns. Often these houses were remarkably close – sometimes right next door – to a shack. You would never see that in the North. It struck me as notably ironic that Southerners could despise blacks so bitterly and yet live comfortably alongside them, while in the North people by and large did not mind blacks, even respected them as humans and wished them every success, just so long as they didn’t have to mingle with them too freely.

By the time I reached Tupelo it was dark. Tupelo was a bigger place than I had expected, but by now I was coming to expect things to be not like I expected them to be, if you see what I mean. It had a long, bright strip of shopping malls, motels and gas stations. Hungry and weary, I saw for the first time the virtue of these strips. Here it all was, laid out for you – a glittering array of establishments offering every possible human convenience, clean, comfortable, reliable, reasonably-priced places where you could rest, eat, relax and re-equip with the minimum of
physical and mental exertion. On top of all this they give you glasses of iced water and free second cups of coffee, not to mention free matchbooks and scented toothpicks wrapped in paper to cheer you on your way. What a wonderful country, I thought, as I sank gratefully into Tupelo’s welcoming bosom.

IN THE MORNING
I went to Elvis Presley’s birthplace. It was early, and I expected it to be closed, but it was open and there were already people there, taking photographs beside the house or waiting to file in at the front door. The house, tidy and white, stood in a patch of shade in a city park. It was amazingly compact, shaped like a shoe-box, with just two rooms: a front room with a bed and dresser, and a plain kitchen behind. But it looked comfortable and had a nice homey feel. It was certainly superior to most of the shacks I had seen along the highway. A pleasant lady with meaty arms sat in a chair and answered questions. She must get asked the same questions about a thousand times a day, but she didn’t seem to mind. Of the dozen or so people there, I was the only one under the age of sixty. I’m not sure if this was because Elvis was so clapped-out by the end of his career that his fans were all old people, or whether it is just that old people are the only ones with the time and inclination to visit the homes of dead celebrities.

A path behind the house led to a gift shop where you could buy Elvis memorabilia – albums, badges, plates, posters. Everywhere you looked his handsome, boyish face was beaming down at you. I bought two postcards and six books of matches, which I later discovered, with a strange sense of relief, I had lost somewhere. There was a visitors’ book by the door. All the visitors came from towns with
nowhere names like Coleslaw, Indiana, Dead Squaw, Oklahoma, Frigid, Minnesota, Dry Heaves, New Mexico, Colostomy, Montana. The book had a column for remarks. Reading down the list they said, ‘Nice’, ‘Real nice’, ‘Very nice’, ‘Nice’. Such eloquence. I turned back to an earlier page. One visitor had misunderstood the intention of the remarks column and had written ‘Visit’. Every other visitor on that page and the facing page had written ‘Visit’, ‘Visit’, ‘Re-visit’, ‘Visit’, until someone had turned the page and they got back on the right track.

The Elvis Presley house is in Elvis Presley Park on Elvis Presley Drive, just off the Elvis Presley Memorial Highway. You may gather from this that Tupelo is proud of its most famous native son. But it hadn’t done anything tacky to exploit his fame, and you had to admire it for that. There weren’t scores of gift shops and wax museums and souvenir emporia all trying to make a quick killing from Presley’s fading fame, just a nice little house in a shady park. I was glad I had stopped.