That’s the key, he said again. Man, that’s the key to the whole thing. Man, you miss that and you miss the main thing about what book learning is all about, don’t care which colleges and universities you go to and how many degrees you come back with. Remember them gold watch chains and neck chains and graduation keys graduating classes used to buy to wear once they got their diplomas? What did they fit into? Nothing. No locks that your grade-point average hadn’t qualified to open, by that time if you see what I mean. And even as I said I do, I really do, the very first person who had come to mind was Creola Calloway, not because she knew what to want but because she was somebody who knew what she did not want, no matter how many other people agreed with each other about what they thought she should want. The one and only Creola Calloway, who became notorious in Gasoline Point because it was as if she was just about the only one in town who did not think she should go into show business and become rich and famous because she was as good-looking as she was.
Not that she thought that being that good-looking was not supposed to be a special blessing and a God-given blessing at that, and therefore something to be grateful for and modest about. And the fact of the matter was that just about everybody seemed to be so impressed with how good-looking she was that it was also as if they regarded her as public property, and had no choice in the matter of what she should do with her own future.
As I sat musing in the library that afternoon that many years later, I suddenly realized that it had been as if just about everybody in Gasoline Point back during those days had been so dazzled by how she looked that it was as if they never paid any attention at all to how nice and friendly and just like another one of the folks she always was with everybody. Nobody ever accused her of being stuck up. On the contrary, what some people said about her implied that her big problem was that she was not as stuck up as people wanted her to be!
I hadn’t mentioned anything about Creola Calloway to Deke Whatley as we stood at the curb outside the barbershop that first Thursday afternoon. All I said at first was what I said about Miss Lexine Metcalf warning me that I might be one of the splendid young men who might have to travel far and wide to find out what mission I was best suited to or called to fill, and that splendid young men were precisely those who qualified for their mission even as they searched for it.
To which he said, See what I mean? So take your time and go step by step and get it right. Right for you yourself, man. I know exactly where she’s coming from. Right out of that old one about answered prayers bringing more tears or grief and stuff than unanswered ones. You heard what I said when I said what I said about knowing what to want, didn’t you? Well, there it is.
So before starting in on the academic materials that I had come to start collecting in preparation for the winter term for the course I was teaching, I went on thinking about what Deke Whatley had said to how pleased Hortense Hightower was with what she decided to do after she had finished college and spent the time she had spent singing with a road band.
And then I went on remembering how when I graduated with a fellowship for advanced study she got me the job as summer substitute and how that led to the time I spent in California that led to what turned out to be my friendship with Gaynelle Whitlow in West Los Angeles, and my very special relationship with Jewel Templeton of Beverly Hills by way of Minnesota on the upper Mississippi.
To Gaynelle Whitlow, not unlike Joe States, Hollywood was really pretty much the same as a factory town where production companies made movies, just as Detroit was a motor town where motor companies made automobiles.
So to her, glamour in Hollywood was really a sales device, much the same as body and accessory design were in the automobile industry.
As for her current means of livelihood, she described herself as a freelance projects administrator and office manager. As for the future, I’m all for it, she liked to say, and then go to point out that sometimes it brought good luck and sometimes bad luck but it was always hard on good-looking women whose beauty was their stock-in-trade. Not that she herself did not have the kind of good looks you could trade on. She didn’t take your breath away, as Creola Calloway did, but as soon as I saw her in that booth in the Home Plate I knew she could get along very well on her looks alone. But as that first evening got under way I found myself thinking that she was just the kind of bosom pal Creola Calloway needed when I was the boy becoming the schoolboy I was becoming in Gasoline Point.
When I met Jewel Templeton, she had just recently met and become a friend of the Marquis de Chaumienne and some of his French and Italian friends, and was more concerned with what to do with the success she had already achieved as featured leading lady and costar than with becoming a superstar.
In any case, I got the impression that what
