A Night at CS's
Saturday night. We arrive just before eight so not to lose our table, in the back, in the corner of the original CS’s building. An annex added years later sits beside, its floor about four inches higher, where rest the pool tables, pinball, and video games. I have the high score on Popeye and the second highest on Joust, or I used to. I'll have to check.
Doug brings Janie and a bottle of Mezcal. I'm stag, but might have a late night. She's older, and I have to wait till her child is asleep, if I go at all. There are things to be said for having a thirty-two-year-old interior designer as a back-pocket girl, but I generally leave them unsaid. It's nobody's business.
My primary agenda is Mezcal, the good kind with the worm, beer, cigarettes, and an un-Christian amount of gossip between me, Doug, Janie, and Al Val. And so it begins.
The walls are plastered with the last thirty-seven years of Mississippi political bumper stickers. Above that are beer cans from around the world. If you brought Pat a beer can he didn't have, he'd trade you whatever beer he was serving, and your Norwegian beer can would earn a place among the legends. It's getting difficult to find beers he doesn't already have. But people still try.
Seventy years of cigarette smoke stain the walls and the ceiling. Everything is brown. The bar itself is made from old doors. Some carpenter got clever. The head of a Russian boar hangs over the bathroom. He wears green mardi gras beads from one of the first five St Paddy's Day Parades. A sign hangs over the beer cooler, “This ain't Burger King, you take it our way or you don't get the son of a bitch.” T-shirts are for sale with an Alpine skier superimposed over a cotton field. “Ski Mississippi.” Neon beer signs abound. A plastic model of the Budweiser Clydesdale team forms a clock that quit working years ago.
Pat bought the restaurant from a man who inadvertently gave it the name CS’s by being one. At least that's the legend. I know more about it than that, but I'm not telling it. It's been across from Millsaps College since Moses left Egypt. George Harmon was building a wall around Millsaps. Mothers Against Drunk Driving forced Mississippi to raise the drinking age to twenty-one. The times, they are a changin’.
The lunch crowd at CS’s was legislators, lawyers, and tradesmen. With Stockett Stables out of business, a fair amount of legislation was worked out there over meat and three plate lunches. Sometimes the younger ones came at night, too. Hob Bryan was a regular. He came to see how his work played out on the news. Sometimes, he'd glare.
Part of my job with my father was to lobby for education and textbook bills. He gave me a copy of the Mississippi blue book and told me to memorize the names. That's a pretty good entry to lobbying.
Herman Hines’ Son-in-law was governor. He had been part of the fabled “Boys of Spring” under William Winter. He has his own version of the education reform act, sometimes called “part two,” but it's not going as well. I'd been out of college for almost two years, but CS’s was still my starting point most nights.
Inez comes by. There have been other first mates at CS’s, but none had the presence of Inez.
“Hey, baby. Y’all need beers?”
Doug holds out his arm to be twisted.
“Y’all gonna eat?”
Janie is a lady, so she gets a Chris’s delight, a tidy roast beef, mushroom, onion, and cheese sandwich. Doug, Al, and I get the big Inez with cheese fries. While there are some great burgers in Jackson, the Inez is the only one to become actually famous. She even went on TV once to explain how she made it.
A half pound of ground beef is cooked medium, then covered with no-bean chili, then canned queso sauce, topped with onions, pickles, and marinated jalapeno slices. Steak fries with the same cheese sauce fill out the plate. While some try to eat it with their hands, I prefer to use a knife and fork so I don't have to fight it going down my arms. A big Inez is a fitting compliment to heavy drinking, but maybe not so if you can’t hold your liquor.
“What'd you ever do with that girl, Bus?” Inez asks. Bus and I used to frequent CS’s. One night, we started there, then went to her place because she said she had that sticky, icky herb. She spent the rest of the night in her underwear, feeding olive loaf baloney into the box fan and giggling like an adorable hyena.
“She left for Mississippi State,” I said. In truth, spending so much time with her, we both nearly failed out of school. Her dad said she needed to get out of Jackson and get cleaned up or he'd cut off the checks, so State it was.
With beers and food coming, it was time to crack open the Mezcal. The worm awaits. Mezcal is sort of a more intense version of tequila. Some people call it the Mexican Absinthe. I've never hallucinated drinking it, but I wouldn't have been surprised.
One night, Doug and I drank our way down to the worm, and then sampled some of what was in brother Weidie’s shoe box. Making our way back to CS’s, the only really wholesome KA was talking away to me at the bar. I studied his mouth and his eyes intently, then I finally said, “Beave, don't talk to me. I have no idea what you're saying.” While I was telling the truth, I think it hurt his feelings. He was a very earnest fellow.
Our food comes. Shot. Beer. Burger. This is the way. Other people are coming.
Brother Overby is home from learning to be a lawyer at that Oxford Day School. He lays out three dollars’ worth of quarters on the pool table. Clearly, he was hoping to win some money. His Oxford cloth shirt is already wrinkled, and Marlboro Reds show through the pocket. A head taller than the normal people, Sir Bonehead comes in. A buxom brunette adores him. I don't think he notices.
A raven princess arrives with two running mates. There are secrets between us that nobody needs to know. Her grandfather likes to talk to me about politicians who have been dead for twenty years. She has an immigrant heritage, but in Mississippi, unless you're actually speaking Mexican, nobody cares. The way I'm headed, I may be speaking Mexican by the end of the night.
She's wearing a washed and distressed denim mini skirt, a washed and distressed denim jacket with the sleeves rolled up. She wears what looks like a wife-beater t-shirt underneath, but there's a very good chance it's a jumper that snaps in the middle so she can pee. I've seen it before. Thin and lean, she's never actually needed a brassiere, but has a collection of them worth more than some starter homes. One of her running mates has tried to kiss me three times, but I pretended not to notice. Besides violating an unspoken trust with the princess, the girl was pretty drunk too, and there are rules if you hope to remain a gentleman. She was so pretty, though.
I brought Indonesian clove cigarettes for when most of the Mezcal was gone. The cloves pop when you smoke them. I figure that's enough for one night. I have an after-hours appointment, after all.
It's starting to get crowded. When the drinking age changed, Inez asked me to help her card people. I see Jack Gaery’s youngest child. She's gonna be pissed if I have to card her.
A tall boy from Prep with a reputation for fighting arrives. I could fight. He'd have to be picking on somebody, but I'd be down. A lot of ladies don't like it when you fight. Our shared gentile companion is no ordinary lady, though; she has a devilish side. While she wouldn't approve, she wouldn't stop me either. You'd be surprised how much trouble Janie got me into over the years.
Jackson was changing. The cast iron fence around Millsaps was a clear sign. Twenty years of white flight, kicked off by school integration, were taking a toll. While a lot of people had a laser focus on how black Jackson was becoming, I was more concerned about how poor it was becoming. We were past the high point of Mississippi Camelot. The days when the thin cows ate the fat cows were here.
A few weeks before, in the parking lot of CS’s, a black boy pulled a pistol on one of my Chi Omega girls and demanded her tiny gold cross necklace. She screamed. I can hear a scream over anything. By the time I burst through the door, I could see the robber running down the street under the mercury vapor lamps. I pursue as fast as I can.
“Stop! He has a gun!” I hear. I stop so I won't upset them.
Quoting Blazing Saddles, Doug says, “If you shoot him, you'll just make him mad,” meaning me. It occurs to me that getting a weapons charge over a thirty-dollar cross pendant from Gayfers was just bad math. Poverty comes with bad decisions. Most people want to blame his race, but our broken and fractured culture is probably at fault. Skinny cows and fat cows.
As the night wears on, I'm in a groove. Everyone is talking but me. I’ve switched from businessman to writer, my secret obsession. Just a plain secret, mostly. I'm watching. Taking inventory of humanity.
After the ten o'clock news, the channel three news team has taken to having a cold one at CS’s. A young Howard Baloo comes in. “Bob!” Doug shouts. Babaloo was the trademark song of Desi Arnaz, husband of Lucille Ball. I don't think Howard ever knew we called him that. Maybe he figured Bob was somebody behind him.
WLBT has added a young Italian girl as a junior reporter. She wears her hair in tight pin curls. I smile at her. She turns her nose up. In my life, I've noticed that women have no interest in me unless they know who I am. Clearly, she didn't. Besides, we hadn’t been introduced. A gentleman waits until he's introduced. The funny part is, knowing who I am doesn't tell you any of the interesting bits. Still, in a world full of men who want your attention, a woman has to have some system of separating the sheep from the goats.
For people with ADHD, the noise from large crowds has an intoxicating impact of its own. I struggle to separate “wait till the midnight hour” from the laughter and bottle noises. The Jukebox at CS’s is a good half of the experience. I’ve punched in “Rubber band man” for me and “I fall to pieces” for Janie. Pretty good for a quarter.
Inez comes by with six tall boy empties stuffed under her arm. “You want more?”. She asks.
“I dunno, how much more you got?” I answer.
“Four more,” Doug says. Al Val Party Pal is losing his vowels. I’m questioning the existence of God. Raven princess smiles at me. She knows too much. We eat. We drink. We finish the mezcal and our share of the infinite beer at CS’s.
In the night air, I decide not to make my midnight rendezvous. She deserves better, I figure. The energy drains out of the city like swamp gas in the summer night sky. Camelot is dying. I can feel it. The next governor becomes famous for cheating on his wife and threatening to whip Bert Case’s ass. There's never a dull moment. White people are striking out for Rankin and Madison counties like boats leaving the Titanic. Young lovers try to decide if they both will fit on a door.
The patio room serves coffee and breakfast all night. That's my next stop. I bring a book. “Light in August.” Faulkner is a cousin and an old dead friend that I never met. I'll be there till dawn. Doug ate the mezcal worm, but it sits beside me till it slowly vanishes.
