I said, 'Pardon?'
'Hit be's closed now. You kin look around the grounz if you woan, but you cain't go insod.'
I wint outsod thinking 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 lifestyle. 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 anymore. 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 kid knew all about. Once in a while we would swap our dads' magazines 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 fifties 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 lifestyle. 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 table of 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 been 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 magazine. It was exactly like seeing an old high-school hero and discovering that 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 anymore.
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 zoo of them, but they all had titles like Machine Gun Collector, Obese Bride, Christian Woodworker, Home Surgery Digest. There was nothing for a normal person, so I left.
I drove out 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 3 (roughly halfway 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. Could that kind of hate have been extinguished in just one generation? It hardly seemed possible. 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 anythingexcept 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-mowed 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
