Beach Music (76 page)

“God was all of them,” Jordan explained. “He came to us in different forms. He loved us and wanted to look out for us.”

“He did a piss-poor job,” I said.

“A great job,” Jordan said. “We’re all alive.”

“How do you know this? About God, I mean. Appearing as those animals.”

“I asked Mary, his mother,” Jordan said. “You always have to go to the source.”

Part V

T
hrough no preference or selection of our own, the graduating class of 1966, in high schools all over America, found ourselves cast like dice across the velvet-covered gambling tables of history. There were no signposts or catechisms or rules of the road to help us navigate through the weary mazes of the sixties. We were shot out indiscriminately into the trickery of the slippery, rampaging decade, and the best we could do was cover our eyes and ears and genitalia like pangolins or armadillos and make sure that our soft underbellies were not exposed for either inspection or slaughter.

The Class of 1966 was entering an America that was newly hallucinatory and disfigured. The whole country seemed to have turned inward upon itself and all the old certainties seemed marginal and hollow, and that tangy confidence of a nation accustomed to strutting turned hesitant almost overnight. As our footsteps echoed across the stage, this class entered a country that was traveling incognito even to itself. We would become part of the first American generation of this century to wage war on each other. The Vietnam War would be the only foreign war ever fought on American soil. All were free to choose sides. Bystanders were ridiculed and not tolerated. There were no survivors in the sixties, only casualties and prisoners of war and veterans who cried out in the dark.

Though I still consider the sixties the silliest and stupidest of times, I will admit, under pressure, that some of it was wonderful,
even magnificent. I felt acutely, transcendentally alive then, while none of the succeeding decades has made me feel a single thing. But I did not think I would have ever recognized the boy I had turned into back then. I was not even certain that the college boy, Jack McCall, would slow down to shake hands with the man he was required to turn into after all the smoke had cleared.

I had loved the University of South Carolina: my escape from my father’s house seemed an emancipation of spirit beyond any price or measure. My father could no longer humiliate me because I simply was unavailable, no longer inhabiting the same house. Each day my teachers forced me to pay attention to the written works of writers I had not yet heard of. I discovered to my joy that these anonymous men and women who had practiced their secret wizardry with the English language long before I was born wrote exquisitely. It surprised me when I read Chaucer in Middle English and found him to be a most hilarious writer. I had not even imagined that people laughed and kidded around in medieval England. In my innocence, I assumed that laughter itself was a modern innovation and held no place in the destinies of charwomen and longbowmen of years past. Drifting through books, I found the pleasures of discovery to be an almost daily occurrence.

My first two years of college were quiescent, exhilarating, busy. The immensity of the university, the anonymity of that unruly, self-governing city-state operating in full view of the state capitol provided me a bright glimpse of a world as rife with possibility and those prodigal chances, open-ended and acute, that a boy with nerve could run away with to the end of the earth. Ideas refreshed and overwhelmed me as though some moon within me was perpetually full and the tide always high.

While other colleges in America seethed and boiled during the nationwide debate on the Vietnam War, we students of the University of South Carolina drank. We drank bathtubs full of a ghastly concoction called “purple Jesus,” composed of unfermented grape juice and cheap vodka. Silver kegs of beer enthroned in melting pools of ice sat in royal attendance at every student event. Drunkenness was a condition of choice among a high percentage of the
student body; and a studied, self-conscious sense of irony and cool was the most highly prized attitude among the males preening and fanning their tail feathers for the edification of the highly selective coeds.

The Greek system was paramount and unchallenged in its authority over all aspects of campus life when our freshman class arrived at Carolina. The only Greek that I have ever learned was in that first year, when I tried to distinguish among the bewildering array of fraternities and sororities whose names caused confusion and dissension among the ranks of freshmen. Capers confided in me during the first month that one’s choice of a fraternity was the most significant selection a man would make before his engagement to a proper young woman. He told me that five former KA’s and six former SAE’s had written flattering letters of reference for him which both chapters had received the previous summer. From Ledare, I learned that three of her mother’s sorority sisters had written letters on her behalf, but the fact that her mother herself was a Tri Delt from Carolina took much of the guesswork out of her fate. As a legacy, Ledare confessed, she was practically a shoo-in through no achievement of her own.

I attended most of the parties the fraternities gave and caught an infinitesimal glimpse of a social milieu I had heard rumor of but had never quite understood because of its subtlety. Ledare had broken up with me after high school graduation because she was coming upon her debutante season and my family and I did not quite cut the mustard among those committees that passed judgment on the desirability and entitlement of both the debutantes and their beaux. Since my father was a judge and a member of the bar and his mother was a Sinkler from Charleston, I had always assumed that my bloodline was passable, if not sublime. I never fully understood the depth of the mismatch my father had made when he had married my raw, unlettered mother. Nor could my mother help me navigate those perilous shallows. I understood neither the code nor the uniform of fraternity life and both were something that a young man needed drilled into his psyche long before rush week. Everything that was right about me in high school was wrong for the best fraternities. I
was a quick study and could take the temperature of a room like a column of mercury, so I felt my otherness instantly as I watched the painfully cordial brothers assess me from head to foot.

In early August, I had received another surprising lesson in the mysterious social ethic that my friends seemed so at ease with. I had accompanied Capers and the imperious Mrs. Middleton on a shopping expedition to Berlin’s in Charleston to purchase the proper clothing for Capers during that all-important first year.

“Remember,” Eulalia Middleton said, “the first impression is the only impression that counts
and,”
she said, stretching the word out for emphasis, “the only one that lasts.”

“So true. So true,” said Mr. Berlin, helping Capers into a blue blazer.

“Wrapping is what turns a common present into a treasure,” she intoned, as Capers studied himself in a black pin-striped suit.

“You should write a book, Mrs. Middleton,” Mr. Berlin said, making chalk marks on the cuffs of the rolled-up pants. “Though these things seem obvious to us, you’d be appalled by some of the things I hear in this store.”

“It’s all just common sense
and,”
she said, arching her eyebrows and catching my eye in the mirror, “good taste is just something one is born with or
not.”

When Capers bought a tuxedo that afternoon, I learned that one could actually purchase a tuxedo and not merely rent one for the night. When Capers’ bill was added up, it came to over three thousand dollars and I whistled in amazement, then realized I had committed an unrecallable social gaffe as I saw Capers, Mrs. Middleton, and Mr. Berlin go to great pains to pretend they had not heard it. Making up figures in my head, I wondered if my parents had spent three thousand dollars on me during my entire life, and that counted food. But I was dazzled by the care that Capers and his mother took in the well-considered selection of his college wardrobe.

When Capers was trying on a beautifully cut London Fog raincoat, I had gasped at the price and said, “What’ll you need that for, Capers?”

Mrs. Middleton looked quizzical, then said, “Do you think that it doesn’t rain in the upper portions of the state?”

“Sure,” I said. “But you can always duck inside somewhere. Run home.”

“A gentleman doesn’t
duck
anywhere,” Mrs. Middleton explained.
“And
a gentleman is prepared for all exigencies of weather. You’ll need a black umbrella to walk young ladies back to their sorority houses in the rain, Capers. What on earth will you do about those young ladies, Jack?”

“Guess I’ll grab their hand and tell ’em to run for it with me.”

“Indeed,” said Mrs. Middleton, but I saw Mr. Berlin suppressing a smile.

Though I tried to assimilate all the protocols of college life in my off-key first semester, there was too much detail to process in such a short time. I was too self-conscious and disheveled to make a perfect fit into the complex pecking order of the best fraternities. I watched the stir that followed Capers’ entrance into a fraternity mixer and realized that it was something far more mysterious than London Fog that made these potential brothers lukewarm and noncommittal when I trailed like a pilot fish behind Capers from party to party. The courtesies were all observed to the letter, yet I could feel my appearance creating almost no disturbances as I drifted from house to house in search of that perfect comfort zone that would tell me subliminally that I had come, at last, to the right place. Though no one told me straight-out, I became aware that I was not even remotely desirable to the top-rank fraternities on campus and was at best a low to mid-list candidate in the second-rate fraternities. Their surgery was done wordlessly and without anesthesia. Long before the fraternities made their final choices, I knew I was not in the running and I told all my friends from high school that I had decided to be an Independent.

Many years later, I would admit to myself that my fierce championing of the antiwar movement would have been unnecessary if SAE could have gotten beyond my mail-order catalog attire and the towering, unsettling rawness of my entrance into parties. The aura of the small town still clung to me; the cheap scent of the backwater followed my silent wanderings as I tried my best to find my own niche on the Carolina campus. I had expected to still spend most of my time with my best friends from Waterford and simply add
dazzling names to that list as we entered into each and every phase of campus life. It troubled me, then displeased me that Capers and Ledare were taken out of circulation with friends like me as soon as they arrived on campus. While fraternities were courting Capers with an internecine ferocity, the sororities had practically gone to war to win Ledare’s approval.

Mike had joined forces with the ZBT’s, the Jewish fraternity, from the day he entered Carolina on the run and on the move. He was foresighted and clear-thinking and he knew where he was going. He had wanted to work in the movie industry since he was in high school, but he had to make his way toward filmdom. Though he majored in Business Administration, Mike immediately began to take every course the English department offered that had anything at all to do with film. He also went to the movies every day and made careful notes about what he thought about each and every film he saw. Whenever the lights went out in a movie theater and the credits began to roll on a huge screen, Mike was a perfectly happy man. College life fully engaged him with its extraordinarily busy social life, the seriousness of its academic course work, and the opportunity that it provided an ambitious boy like Mike to extend his horizons as far as his wit and depth could take him. Since he had come from a family that deeply loved him, Mike assumed that everyone he met would surrender to his basic good nature, and almost everyone did. His smile was infectious and sprang out of his generous yet inquisitional nature. He wanted to know the life story of everyone he passed and he had time to talk to anyone. He had a small genius for drawing out shy people and bringing them along as observers and cheerleaders in his fast-talking, pixilated world. On campus, he became famous for carrying an 8-millimeter camera everywhere he went. His skill with a camera slowly turned to a kind of artistry.

At the university, only Shyla seemed to remain unchanged in the heady atmospherics of college life. None of the vainglory and maneuvering among the coeds seemed of any interest to her at all. Since she was the prettiest Jewish girl on campus, and seemed to grow prettier every day, from the moment she set foot into her room in Capstone House she dated a whole series of the most desirable
and attractive Jewish boys on campus, including the president of ZBT. She joined the newspaper staff of the
Gamecock
her first week and won a minor part in the first theatrical production of the young season in
Timon of Athens
. Nothing about her seemed changed or forced or derivative, and whenever I saw her I could turn a page backward in my life and see where I had once been by merely gauging her reaction to me. Though Shyla had dared me to fall in love with her the summer before when we danced in the Middletons’ doomed beach house, she knew that I was not yet ready. She was patient and serene and confident that our history in the oak tree would eventually bring me to her. We often met for lunch in the Russell House and continued our childhood habit of telling each other everything. The one thing both of us agreed on was how much we missed Jordan and wished he had matriculated at the university instead of following in his father’s footsteps to the Citadel. Neither of us thought the free-spirited Jordan would blossom in the Citadel’s brutal trial by fire for its six hundred plebes.