The Pat Conroy Cookbook (35 page)

When we rose for the kickoff, I experienced a moment of sheer anxiety when the birdlike woman to my left began to bark like a Georgia bulldog. “Arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf!” You get the picture, but it did not let up, so after five minutes I was nearing hysteria as the woman’s barking increased in intensity and volume. She would quit barking only for the several delicious moments when she took a fast swill from her drink and shouted into the sunshine-sweetened air: “Let the big dog drink!”

The barking continued unabated as I became claustrophobic, which began to make breathing difficult. Finally, in desperation, I said, “Madam, do you plan to bark like a bulldog for the entire game?”

She stopped, flashed her ferocious eyes at me, and said, “You’re just like that son of a bitch who usually sits here.”

“Yeah, I can see why it must be a pleasure to surrender those tickets to a stranger.”

“I’ll bet you’re for the goddamn Tennessee Volunteers.”

“I wasn’t when this game began, but I sure am thinking hard about it now,” I said.

She answered me by barking, “Arf, arf, arf, arf, arf,” until halftime, when she mercifully stopped, took a last swallow, and screamed at me, “Let the big dog eat.”

The silence seemed funereal when the woman stopped barking. Then she surprised me by turning friendly. “Hello. Now, son, I’ve got to rest my vocal chords for the second half. So tell me all about yourself. Where you from, honey?”

“Madam, I’m from Beaufort, South Carolina,” I said.

“Beaufort, South Carolina!” she screamed. “I love everything about Beaufort, South Carolina, everything about that pretty little river town. But do you know what I love most about Beaufort?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t.”

“I love to get drunk in Beaufort, South Carolina.” Then she turned to Knox Dobbins and said, “Sweetie pie, where you from, sugar?”

Knox answered, “I’m from Knoxville, Tennessee.”

Again she screamed. “Knoxville, Tennessee? I know everything there is to know about Knoxville, Tennessee. Everything, honey. You know what I love most about Knoxville, Tennessee, the really great thing?”

“No, ma’am, I can’t imagine,” said Knox.

“I love to get drunk in Knoxville, Tennessee.”

There was a pretty young woman sitting next to Knox whom neither of us knew, but who had been dragged into the dance of the bulldog-woman by mere happenstance and the laws of nearness.

“Hey, sweetheart, you look down here, darling. Where are you from, girl?”

“My hometown is Valdosta, Georgia,” the young woman replied.

“Valdosta, Georgia? Now there’s a place to remember. There’s a town you can love. Do you know what I love most about Valdosta, Georgia? The very best thing you can say about Valdosta?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t.”

The older woman paused, took another drink of bourbon, and said, “I love your goddamn onions.”

I told that story once in South Dakota and once in New Hampshire. The audience waited for me to complete the story or get to the point. That’s why I know it is the perfect Southern story—it doesn’t travel well.

A
t the moment I first met Alex Sanders, the mythical and larger-than-life former president of the College of Charleston, it was on a hillside in North Georgia, where he stood holding a brace of live Maine lobsters in a doughnut box while he taught a group of children a magic trick. We were the guests of two ebullient Georgians, Joe and Emily Cummings, on the first of twenty-five annual weekends when a specially selected group of friends would gather for sparkling conversation and superb food. I had always thought I had a good personality until I met Alex Sanders, and I found myself gripped by a kind of autism during that memorable encounter, when Alex dazzled the entire entourage with stories about the South that seemed epic in scope and definitive in nature. That evening, we met at sunset, with the long shadows moving across the hills and the last light sliding across the mountain lake like icing slow to cool.

Emily Cummings, our hostess, pointed toward the disappearing sun and shouted to her musical and talented family, “Oh, look. The sunset. The sheer beauty of the world.”

Her husband, Joe, a wordsmith of great note, added, “By God, this light is a changeling, even a barbaric thing. Thus, this noble orb,
engorged with mercury and gold, vanishes even as we speak the name of harsh, demonic night…”

I was new to all this and found it interesting, indeed. Long prepared for these sudden paganlike moments of ecstasy, the four Cummings children, aged eight to eighteen, rushed to their parents’ side and all six of them began humming, tuning, and harmonizing their voices, sounding much like musical instruments warming up in an orchestra pit.

Alex Sanders and his wife, Zoe, watched my reaction to all this with great bemusement. I saw Alex smile as my face turned to pure astonishment when the Cummings family bade farewell to the fast-disappearing sun by bursting into song:

I am not speaking here of a shy, Trappist-like praise of the spilling of time as in Lauds or Matins. It looked like the finale of
Show Boat
or
West Side Story
, with everyone singing at the top of their voices, their arms extended, Joe down on one knee, and Emily thrusting an umbrella out toward the mountains and beyond.

Alex Sanders noticed my puzzlement and utter surprise at the suddenness and spontaneity of the scene as the valley rang with the echoes of the hymn.

Then Alex spoke: “Ah! I could not help but notice—this is your first time with the Family von Trapp.”

I fell in love with Alex Sanders that weekend, simply one of the many over the years who have been overwhelmed and ambushed in the field by the sheer immensity of his charm. By a roaring fire on the second day, Alex told some of the greatest stories I had ever heard, and I had to fight the urge to retreat to my room to record them in my journal while their fresh, persimmon-like details still burned along the taste buds of memory. In firelight, Alex had the head of a Javanese tiger and a serenity that enabled him to hold court without resorting to coarseness or testosterone.
He waited his turn, then used a matador’s skill in controlling the pace of his narrative, and by changing the rhythm of his great accented voice, he could move us the way the matador could change the direction of a bull’s charge by the flick of the wrist and the false billow created in that acreage of red cape. His phrasing was eloquent, colloquial, his pitch perfect. Wonderful writers surrounded him, and all of them found themselves bested and awed.

I will always remember Alex sitting in his flannel shirt with the smell of burning wood around us as the fires of autumn lit up the ridge of Tate Mountain with the surprising beauty that withering grants to its high forests. Alex’s stories matched the uncommon colors of fall, where the trees flared up in all the vividness of wild roses gone to seed, the wings of hairstreaks and hummingbirds and all the last rainbows of the dying year. Rarely had I encountered stories so original, so strong with delightful detail, so perfect. Like wood smoke, his stories were born of fire, then carried away through air.

Whenever I have been in the presence of Zoe and Alex Sanders, the food has always been fabulous, the company unparalleled, the drink free-flowing and plentiful, and the conversation thrilling, heady, life-changing. As a couple, they have turned the dailiness of life into an art form and invited anyone who crosses their path to learn all its steps and secrets. As the College of Charleston knows, the now-retired President and Mrs. Sanders live out their lives at full speed, incapable of holding anything back. Both are fine cooks, and I have eaten like a deposed Italian king when I’ve found myself a lucky guest in their house. Zoe has as inimitable a reputation and mystique as a hostess as her husband does as an orator or storyteller or judge or educator. She is pretty, fiercely competent, fiery in her beliefs, and tenacious in her loves and enthusiasms.

Once, I sat with friends as Alex and Zoe fixed a fish stew that I remember being as good as any bouillabaisse that I ordered in the back-streets of Marseilles. The rouille they composed to top that soup in cloudlike dollops was a lovesong to garlic. I can summon up visions of past meals that have included ice chests loaded down with shrimp that had been swimming offshore that morning; oysters gathered during the last
low tide; salads glistening with olive oil and darkened with raindrops of balsamic vinegar; fennel and red peppers blistered on the same grills where marinated flank steaks will follow; quail and wild rice swimming in gravy; sirloin steaks as large as my head hanging off serving platters; grouper and salmon and mahimahi coming off their bones in nuggets of white flesh that tastes like seaborne butter to the palate.

Both Alex Sanders and I have been accused of being prone to grotesque exaggeration in our careers, and there is great merit when that accusation is directed at Alex. But in my own defense, I can never convince people outside the South that I know someone as pointlessly colorful, outrageous, and bone-jarringly amusing as Alex Sanders himself. Alex helped me understand that the South I grew up in is so over-the-top and overbaked that I see myself as a shy minimalist trying to ink black-and-white woodcuts of my native land. Southerners all know that the South is too bizarre and out of control for its own good. I always find myself having to surrender some of the juice, hold back on the cayenne and Tabasco, for the sake of credibility itself.

When
The Prince of Tides
came out in 1986, I sat in the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York answering questions from a hostile reporter. As I dined on sweetbreads poached in white wine, I never thought I would be conducting much of the interview about Alex Sanders while a journalist skewered my brightest work.