April 27, 2010

• A Generation - Chester Helms, Jim Dickinson, Janis and Emily

  I have been following the tremendously gifted Crystal Bowersox on American Idol, a neat trick since I haven't owned a TV for 15 years (youtube, I watch on youtube which has no commercials....)  I am struck over and over by the difference between then and now, by what Janis Joplin, to whom I am linked by a common friend, and I, our generation of women, struggled with and against and the relative lack of those issues in Bowersox's musical journey.

  I'm going to write more about this later, but am repeating a piece from 2004 that is apropos to my historian's wish that we not forget lest we loose some of the gains we fought so hard for and in reply to the young woman doctor I saw in the hospital who just didn't or wouldn't understand why I preferred Ms. to Miss, and kept calling me Mrs, even tho I pointed out five days in a row (Morning, Mrs Hodges) that Mrs Hodges was my dead mother, hoping for success through shock value..

  "Listening to Dixie Fried, Atlantic records producer Jerry Wexler stood up and faced the speakers, spreading his arms.  "If Bob Dylan made this record," he said, "they'd call him the risen Christ."

  ***********************

  I thumbed an old copy of the Chicago Reader while waiting for something to cook.  Bored, I looked at an article about a musician I didn't know.  Waiting like a small exploding star on the third page was the name Jim Dickinson.  I knew someone of that name long ago, forty-four years ago it was, at Baylor where I went to study music because they gave me the biggest scholarship of all the places I applied and that would get me away from Ft.Worth and my psychotic mother.  There are so many things from that time I don't remember, but I did remember that name.  Once in a while I would wonder what happened to him, if he got the theater he wanted.  But I never followed through, never looked.  Sometimes following through takes me to places I didn't know I didn't want to go to.

  The article described him as "famed Memphis producer and musician..."  The boyman I remember too faintly was in theater, but the city was right and he taught me much about blues singers.   It might be the same Jim.  Intrigued, I hit Google and sure enough, this "famed Memphis person" went to Baylor the same time as I did, and studied theater.

  A little more research turned up his website and reviews of his music.  A bit more confirmed it was the manchild I remembered.  He's had an amazing and wonderful life, overflowing with creativity and places to use it, surrounded by family, his boys musicians, Luther and Cody Dickinson of the Northern Mississippi Allstars, taking his gift and carrying it on.

  It's easier to add a link then try to write things out so here's the best I found.

  http://www.popculturepress.com/jimdickinson.html

  I'm not sure how he felt about me, wasn't sure then either.  I met him during a homecoming game, to which I had worn a black pencil skirted suit with a big fluffy fox collar, black suede 3 inch heels and carried a carved ivory cigarette holder (Baylor, 1961, no sweater set, or crysanthemum corsage or plaid skirt or bobbysox).  We hit it off and became a number on campus, probably, he wrote later, the most notorious couple on campus, not hard at Baylor, until he returned to Memphis a year and a half or so later.  He came to see me after an orchestra rehearsal and I remember clearly the first thing he said, can see him standing there, talking, asking "Do you know how powerful and beautiful you look up there on stage with your violin?"  I didn't.  And I remember the last thing he told me, why he was going back to Memphis, said with a reason and words that took a piece out of my heart, even though I was not in love with him, at least not that I knew, left me feeling diminished for years, although I don't believe that was his purpose or intent, just his truth of the day.

  In between, he blew out the edges of what I knew to be possible.  In telling me of things he knew and things he'd done he tore down the boundaries of my two-mile square Ft. Worth girl's world, where the only things I could imagine were those from books or from pictures in Life magazine.  He was a boy, he could go places, do things that a girl could never do, at least not in those times.  So he knew ways to slake the thirst of the curious, knew things outside books, of the world, deep in music, connected to parts of the soul.   I was hungry to know.

  I don't remember many details - the occasional conversation in which he is a presence, not visible, his voice and accent unremembered, though I hear memory's echo in the soft accent in which he sings his songs, but his words clear, spoken in my head as though he is standing or sitting behind me, close to my ear, so that I can hear but not see.   He told me about the circus, about Blind Lemon and Leadbelly, new sounds for my classical musician's mind, about trips to find singers who knew singers, to find old songs.  He read my poetry, understood,  got it published.   He offered validation I had denied myself, that had been denied me, perhaps the first outside the music room or classroom.  I remember the place, my room in a former slave quarters where I fed a group of palmetto bugs that lived on the closet shelf so that the next tenant would have company too.  He tells me it was called the Catacombs, I didn't remember.  But there must have been other places, now lost to me.

  He writes that he heard I was dead.  I never spoke again to anyone at Baylor after I left university in '62.  I suppose to them I was dead.  Maybe to myself I was dead too. He writes that I gave him moments of inspiration throughout his life and that thank you would never be enough for that.  He tells me that I helped him through some of the most difficult parts of his life.  I think he remembers more than I do, or maybe understood what was closed off to me then, and so is invisible to me still.

  The difference in how our lives turned out is stark.  My best friend from high school, the legendary San Francisco rock promoter Chet Helms, to me forever Chester, of long conversations about being a Baptist, about whether or not to be defiant and dance, about Sarte and Jesus on dying summer evenings on my front porch amid fireflies and june bugs in 1959, would tell me years later that in those conversations I set him free and that without them he could have never done what he did nor be who he came to be.  Somehow it seems fitting that at the time he was was hanging around with Janis Joplin, another hurting talented Texas girl, Chester's wordd, I was hanging around with Jim Dickinson.  Symmetry of sorts.  Now that's broken.  Only three of us are still alive.

  Both Chester's and Jim's names now appear prefaced with adjectives like "the fabled," "the famous."  Ah, can't forget "the legendary."   Both are good men.   Both are men.

  My life was different.  Talented, brilliant, gifted, genius, so smart it was frightening to see, like a little vacuum cleaner trying to suck up every piece of knowledge in the world  - those are words linked to my name.  My gifts were different from Chester's and Jim's, but just as big.

  But they were men.  Their world was big and had lots of air.  I had to fight for every breath I took, trying to hold on to my "bright girl" self, holding hard lest it, and therefore me, be sucked away, extinguished, much of myself expended in just holding on..

  On my way home in the plane from the National Science Fair, winner of the Girl's 1st Prize at 16, the fellow with the Boy's 1st Prize from the rich kids high school across town kept trying to get my hand under a blanket and inside his zipper for a hand job.  I can't remember being so taken down to size, so puzzled, so angry, hurt quite so effectively as in this little vignette preview of the workplace, unless it was after the rape when my mother called me a whore, never asking, never acknowledging the reality.  Or maybe it was when Jimmy Lewis kept calling in my junior year in high school, asking, "Do you put out?  I've heard you put out..."  He'd heard wrong, or maybe it was the rapist gossiping.

  "You must choose the college where you'll get the best husband."  "You don't want to be a doctor, girls can't be doctors."  "You're smart, you shouldn't let the boys know."  "Boys won't like you if you're smart.  You've got to hide it."  "No, you can't play the cello, it's not ladylike, holding it between your legs like that."  "If you're not careful with your grooming you'll never get a man."  "Keep your legs together and pull your skirt down."  "You can't cross your legs that way.  Cross them at the ankle."  "I'm sorry that you have to wear glasses.  You're already such a bookworm.  I wonder how you'll ever get a man." "You've got to learn to cook.  How are you going to feed your husband?"  "If you kiss boys, you're going to get pregnant."  "You are going to teach school like your momma did, aren't you?"  "What do you mean you don't want to learn to type.  You'll never get a job." "Why can't you be like your cousin.  She doesn't argue all the time."  "I don't understand why that decent smart white Christian boy comes to see the likes of you..."  "No, you can't take a mechanical drawing class instead of sewing.  Even if you already know how to sew, mechanical drawing is no place for a girl."  "You should go home and have more babies.  Graduate school is no place for a girl."  "Why are you in graduate school, anyway? Teaching university is no job for a girl."  "Your problem is that you don't accept that your only role in life is to care for a family, clean, cook, wash dishes, take care of your husband and children.  Until you accept that freely you will always be depressed.  Until you do, I can't help you."  "Unless you stay at home with your children, they will be ruined."  "Why do you want to play in a major orchestra?  Girls always sit at the back of the section.  They're never as good as the men."  "What is this garbage?  Were you studying?  What's the matter, you don't want to cook anymore?"  "What do you mean, you want to be a political officer.  Political officers work hard and girls don't do very well at it..."  "What do you mean, you got a summa cum laude degree as a single parent.  Being a single parent isn't Real Work, it really doesn't count..."   "You'd make a great personnel officer, you know, girls do well in that job."   "You shouldn't tell anyone in the State Department that you have an advanced degree.  We don't like that much and besides you're female."  "We don't want her to serve at the US Embassy in Islamabad.  She knows too many politicians, judges, bureaucrats, knows the language.  She'd be hard to control, she knows too much.  Besides she's female."  "What do you mean, you'd expect your husband to travel with you from diplomatic post to diplomatic post.  Are you crazy?  No real man would ever do that."

  From birth in 1942 to breakdown in 1984, it was a never ending litany, following me from family to school through marriages to university to Berkeley to the State Department.  It never stopped.   I had no support in the culture, none from my mother.  My father was dead.

  All these words ran around my head like a hamster wheel in perpetual motion.  Their sharp edges shredded the outside of my spirit, cutting through to the bone, drawing out the marrow like sugar juice from a piece of sugar cane, leaving the husk.  My soul was softer, in the end, not hard to tear. Jim remembers me a "strong and independent free spirit in a sea of zombie conformists."  The strong and independent part long ago knelt, wobbly, in submission at the feet of post traumatic stress disorder and major depression, of economic hardship, of finally being too tired to fight for that bright girl self, of breaking into fragments and living in one room for eight years where I felt safe and didn't have to fight anything but the night, afraid to come back into life again. *

  The free spirit, tattered around the edges and stubborn as all hell, remains.  I'd forgotten that.  Thanks for returning it through the mail, Jimmy D."

  pearlbamboo

  ©2004

  * I've written about this struggle here - http://pearlbamboo.xanga.com/249672074/item  in  "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Spends The Evening While Pearl Talks To Her Lover And Seeks To Return to Higher Ground."  A spoken word version is on Sound Click at this time, as "Night Has Names She Understands."  All the poetry is being re-recorded and will at some point in early summer be available on MySpace.  A special thanks to my beloved friend, Jade Maze, http://www.jademaze.com/  who heard me read a poem to a nurse in my hospital room in October 2009, heard the music in it, asked to hear another and then asked to record.  .(note added May 27, 2010)

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