Downtown
Authors: Anne Rivers Siddons
Tags: #Man-woman relationships, #Periodicals, #Contemporary, #General, #Romance, #Atlanta (Ga.), #Women journalists, #Young women, #Fiction
ANNE RIVERS
SIDDONS
DOWNTOWN
FOR JIM TOWNSEND and BOB DANIELS
without whom,
one way or another,
this book would not have happened; and for BILL SHINKER,
without whom many wouldn’t have.
Contents
vii
1
The first thing I saw was a half-naked woman dancing…
3
I had never been to New York, But Carolyn Renfrow…
24
I dreamed of home and early morning and breakfast, and…
49
The city to which I came that autumn was a…
83
I did the YMOG piece well. I sat up all…
116
Sometime in the black early hours next morning Teddy shook…
142
On a still green weekend in May Teddy’s parents invited…
176
John Howard was as good as his word. He found…
211
At the end of July, Brad asked me to go…
231
After that, everything was different, and yet it was not.
274
When we got home from the lake, Brad called from…
312
Have you completely lost your mind? Have you flipped totally…
350
I think that sometimes the great changes in our lives…
374
Whenever I think back to that suspended time between Thanksgiving…
404
On the second Sunday of January, Luke and I went…
435
You have to realize that it’s just for now,” Luke… 458
Come with me,” My Husband says from the Bathroom, where…
484
501
502
504
C
506
E
VERYONE WHO WAS FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO FIND him or herself in Jim Townsend’s orbit during his time at
Atlanta
magazine, in the early and middle 1960s, will have a different notion of the man, the time, and the magazine.
Jim was never the same to any two people—and neither, I suspect, were the sixties. Both remain elusive these thirty years later. Very early in the writing of
Downtown
I gave up trying to catch the precise essence of the early
Atlanta
magazine and its contentious, incandescent founder and editor; I realized that it couldn’t be done—not, at least, by me.
So I tried instead to capture a slice of a particular city in a very particular time in the world, and let the characters become no more and no less than themselves. I am a fiction writer, not a biographer.
So anyone who knew him will see immediately that Jim Townsend is not Matt Comfort—is, in fact, far from him, though perhaps they share some notable eccentricities. Nor is anyone else in these pages anyone I know, or you do, though many quirks will have overlapped.
But the city and the times are as close to my own time Downtown as I could come. No, I’m not Smoky—she’s better woman than I, by far, and very little that happened to her happened to me. But I know her and her time and her world. In essence, if not in incidence, they were mine.
ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / viii
Atlanta was a wonderful, terrible, particular, and special place in those cusp days of the sixties; it could have been no other place on earth, and it will not come again. That luminous particularity is what I strove to capture in these pages.
It may not be precisely as you remember it, but to Smoky O’Donnell and to me, this is how it was, and this is the way we were.
A
LL OVER ATLANTA THAT FALL, IN THE BLUE TWILIGHTS, girls came clicking home from their jobs in their clunky heels and miniskirts and opened their apartment windows to the winesap air, and got out ice cubes, and put on Petula Clark singing “Downtown,” and sat down to wait. Soon the young men would come, drifting out of their bachelor apartments in Bermuda shorts and Topsiders, carrying beers and gin and tonics, looking for a refill and a date and the keeping of promises that hung in the bronze air like fruit on the eve of ripeness.
Atlanta in the autumn of 1966 was a city being born, and the energy and promise of that lying-in sent out subterranean vibrations all over the just-stirring South, like underground shock waves—a call to those who could hear it best, the young. And they came; they came in droves; from small, sleeping towns and large, drowsing universities, from farms and industrial suburbs and backwaters so still that even the building firestorm of the Civil Rights movement had not yet rippled the surface.
It was a time for youth. A tall, new young president had sent out a call of his own, and the young rose up for him 1
ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 2
with joy and purpose and the unbroken surety of his invin-cibility, and theirs. That he had died what was considered a true martyr’s death in another slow, smiling, murderous Southern city did nothing to stem the rush of their ascendancy. On the contrary, it gave them focus and outrage to leaven their callowness; lent them a touch of becoming darkness. It was, after all, a very heady thing to have a new-slain hero of one’s own. Strengthened and salted with his blood, the young surged toward the sun, and nowhere did they preen and jostle and mass themselves so thickly for the coming of…what?…than in Atlanta.
The city was suddenly full of them: pretty girls in new Carnaby Street knockoffs, streaming into the heart of town to their secretarial jobs; young men in dark suits and narrow ties and polished Cordovans and self-conscious new sideburns, marching into banks and brokerage offices and law firms and the budding businesses that they would ride, like the tails of comets, up to meet the high young sun.
They met, of course they did; they met, and came together in pairs and groups and broke apart and reformed, like patterns in a kaleidoscope. It was a common saying in the first singles’ apartments of the city that if a girl couldn’t get a date in Atlanta, the nunnery was the next step. And it was said, too, that if a man couldn’t get a girl there, he’d do better to go back to Birmingham. And it was largely true.
A girl, a man, a career, a romance, a life…it was all out there, just ahead. I remember those autumn days of hope and exuberance and pale lemon sunlight, of softly chilled nights with scarlet leaves lit to translucence by city lights, so full of portent and promise that I often felt my very heart would burst with it.
Oh, wait, just wait, ran the song in mine and many hearts.
Oh, soon. Soon.
T
HE FIRST THING I SAW WAS A HALF-NAKED WOMAN
dancing in a cage above Peachtree Street.
It was a floodlit steel and Plexiglas affair hung from a second-story window, and the dancer closed her eyes and snapped her fingers as she danced in place, in a spangled miniskirt and white go-go boots, moving raptly to unheard music. It was twilight on the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, 1966, when we reached Five Points in downtown Atlanta, and the time-and-temperature sign on the bank opposite the dancer said “6:12 P.M. 43 degrees.” The neon sign that chased itself around the bottom of the dancer’s cage said “Peach-a-Go-Go.”
“Holy Mother of God, look at that,” my father said, and slammed on the brakes of the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser that he loved only marginally less than my mother. Or rather, by that time, more.
I thought he meant the go-go dancer, and opened my mouth to make reassuring noises of shock and disapproval, but he was not looking up at her. He was looking at a straggling line of young Negro men and women walking up and down in front of what I thought must be a delicatessen.
3
ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 4
There was an enormous pickle, glowing poison neon green, over its door. It was raining softly, blending neon and automobile and streetlights into a magical, underwater smear.
The walkers seemed to swim in the heavy air; they carried cardboard placards, ink running in the mist, that read
“Freedom Now,” and “We Shall Overcome.” My heart gave a small fish-flop of recognition. Pickets. Real Civil Rights pickets. Perhaps, inside, a sit-in was in process. Here it was at last, after all the endless, airless years in the Irish Channel back in Savannah, drowned in the twin shadows of the sleeping Creole South and the Mother Church.
Here was Life.
Caught in traffic—a significant, intractable traffic jam, what a wonder—my father averted his eyes from the picketers as if they were naked, and, lifting them toward the alien heavens above him, saw the dancer in her cage. He jerked his foot off the clutch, and the Vista Cruiser stalled.
“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” he squalled. “I’m turning around this minute and taking you home! Sodom and Gomorrah, this place is. You got no business in this place, darlin’; look at that hussy, her bare bottom hangin’ out for all the world to see. Look at those spooks, wantin’ to eat in a place that don’t want them. And have we passed a single church in all this time? We have not, and likely the ones that are here are all Protestant. I told your mother, didn’t I? Didn’t I tell her?
You come on back with me now, and go back to work for the insurance people, them that want you so bad. Didn’t they say they’d let you run the company newspaper, if you’d stay?”
Behind us a horn blared, and then another.
“Pa, please,” I said. “It’s nothing to do with me. I don’t think my office is anywhere near here. Hank said it’s 5 / DOWNTOWN
across from a museum. I don’t see any museum around here; I bet this part of town is just for tourists. And Pa? I’ll go to Mass every Sunday and Friday, too, if I have time. And after all, I’m staying in the Church home for girls. What on earth could happen to me at Our Lady?”
“We don’t know anything about these Atlanta Catholics,”
my father said darkly, but he started the Oldsmobile and inched it forward, into the next block.
“Catholics are Catholics. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen us all,” I said in relief. We were past the go-go dancer and the marching Negroes now.
“I heard some of them take that pill thing—”
“Of course they don’t!” I said, honestly scandalized.
“You’re just talking now. You heard no such thing.”
“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if I did hear it,” he said, but my shock had reassured him. He looked at me out of the corner of one faded blue eye and winked, and I squeezed his arm. My father was in his late sixties then; I was the last child of six, spawn of his middle age, born after he had thought the five squat red sons who were his images would be his allotted issue, and he was a bitter caricature of the bandy-legged, brawling little man upon whose wide shoulders I had ridden when I was small. But his wink could still make me smile, still summon a shaving of the old adoration that his corrosive age and his endless anger had all but smothered.