Mules, Travelers, and Assholes

At homecoming this year, a nineteen-year-old boy asked me what being a KA at Millsaps in the eighties was like. I explained that we spent a lot of time sitting on the porch, drinking cheap beer, discussing Leon Trotsky and Immanuel Kant, occasionally firing the cannon, and waiting for one of the Pikes to invite us to do something more interesting—like a bottle rocket war.

One reason it’s worth the time and money to send somebody to Millsaps is that a nineteen-year-old will eventually know who Immanuel Kant and Leon Trotsky were. Drinking beer and firing cannons is on your own time.

One day, in the Grill, which is now a kind of coffee shop selling stuff I never heard of, a girl who was the little sister of a girl in my class said, in a voice loud enough for the entire Grill to hear, including Mamma and Acey, that “KAs are nothing but a bunch of rich, drunks, drug addicts, and assholes.” I said in an equally loud voice, “We’re not really very rich.” Whether someone is a drunk, drug addict, or asshole is a matter of perspective, I suppose. I knew at the time why she was mad at us, but it’s been forty years since, and I never felt compelled to get into the argument beyond that slight clarification. Her nephew now works for the college. I figure a tradition like that should continue.

In high school at St. Andrews, a sports reporter showed up one day to take our photograph and interview members of the line about why we called ourselves “The Mules.” Speaking for the rest of us, Neil Brown explained to the reporter that Mules were pack animals that did all the work and never got any credit. The reporter must have thought that was a charming explanation because he printed it, along with the photograph.

That’d be fine, except it was bullshit. In the parlance of the late seventies, St. Andrews athletes, a “mule” was a male sex organ. Neil Brown and Mike Sheppard named us “mules” because we were dicks to pretty much everybody and proud of it. It was also a lie that we never got any credit, as evidenced by the fact that our picture was in the paper and the quarterback’s wasn’t.

The next year, the new headmaster expelled about half of the St. Andrews linemen, so we reformed and now called ourselves “The Travelers.” The point of “The Travelers” was for five guys to pile into my jet black 1975 Ford LTD, drink beer, and drive to foreign zip codes to impress country girls with our starched North East Jackson heavy cotton oxford cloth shirts from the Rogue and give them fake names.

There was some benefit to having some South Jackson or East Bentonia beauty talk about the size of my arms for a night, but if she ever looked up the name I gave her in the phone book, she would have found herself calling David Hicks and not me.

It’s been my practice most of my life to keep whatever girl I was actually interested in a pretty big secret. There’s a lot less pressure that way. In my entire high school career, the only time people knew who I was dating was after my girlfriend’s dad shot himself, and I had to break the door down and call the police.

There was a girl at our school who had a weird first name but a very common last name. I liked her, and we talked a lot, but I had zero interest in her. In fact, I’d been secretly spending time with her best friend on the weekend. One day, my friend Mike asked if I was in love. I said, “No.” That’s when he presented what evidence he had that I was in love with the girl with the weird name, which I again refuted. This was at lunch. By the end of the day, everybody in school was asking me how long I’d been in love with this girl and when I was going to ask her out. I tried to explain that I didn’t really have any plans to ask her out because I WASN’T IN LOVE WITH HER, but that didn’t slow anybody down.

A couple of days later, one of her friends pulled me aside and said that I really should just ask her out and get it out of my system. I did my best to explain that there was nothing in my system, but I’d ask her out if it would shut people up—so I did.

The girl with the weird name missed her next two classes. I found out she was hiding in the bathroom because she was afraid to tell me that she didn’t want to go out with me. Having never particularly wanted to go out with her in the first place, I was pretty upset that it might now look like I was trying to bully her. I wasn’t particularly mad at her as much as I was at my friend Mike for starting all this, but I did say something pretty rude to her because I was trying to figure out how to extract myself from this situation.

About a year later, she found a guy she did like and began seeing him. We’d been on and off friends, but I mostly felt a sort of responsibility for her because she had a sort of Pollyanna attitude about life, and ours was not a Pollyanna sort of high school. I knew that the guy she liked was cheating on her because he was cheating on her with a girl that I had also been seeing, only I didn’t have a “girlfriend” to cheat on.

Disturbed that her first-ever “boyfriend” was cheating on her, I pinned him against a tree and told him not to do that anymore. By the time his feet left the ground, two of his friends jumped on my back to make sure I didn’t punch him, which was never my plan. It didn’t work. He continued to be a jerk to her for years to come. I shouldn’t have gotten involved, but I felt like I at least tried to help her out.

When Kathryn Stockett wrote “The Help,” I remembered her from Prep. Although she was six years younger than me, I remembered that her hair used to swing when she walked and that she smiled all the time. Her grandfather used to call me from time to time to see if I wanted to board a horse with him, but really, he just wanted to talk about guys who were related to me who weren’t around anymore. Sometimes, men get pretty lonely and nostalgic for their old friends when they get old. Sometimes, that’s why I write.

While I felt like Stockett had told the truth from her perspective in “The Help,” I figured she’d get in trouble for the “white savior” thing, which did happen. People criticized her for telling the story from the perspective of the white college girl and not one of the black maids. While that might have been an interesting book, it probably could only be written by a black writer or risk being called inauthentic.

Women in high school are every bit as competitive as men in high school, but they express it in different ways. Girls at Prep smiled a lot and spent a great deal of time on their hair. That’s how they ranked each other. Girls at St. Andrews had ways of ranking each other, too, but they were both more subtle and more overt. More than once, I got to see them slap the snot out of each other, which was pretty intimidating.

There were two girls at Prep that I was very, very interested in. One was Greek, and one was Black Irish. Both had fathers who were friends of my father, and that made them absolutely off-limits. The Black Irish girl lived on the other side of Honeysuckle, but her father was one of my doctors. One night, he attended one of my father’s cocktail parties. They had been KAs together at Ole Miss. He was explaining to the other men that there was a blood pressure medicine that had an unusual side effect that had to do with male sexual performance, and he was laughing about all the men who had asked him for a prescription but didn’t give any names, even though everybody asked him too. I assumed none of the men who were laughing with him about Viagra were one of the ones who asked for a prescription, but that’s none of my business.

The Greek girl was part of a legacy Jackson business family. That might be giving away who she was. She was so pretty, and I liked her quite a lot, but there was just no way to cross that boundary. Her dad was on the First Capitol board with my dad. She gave a pretty strong indication that she liked me too and would talk about my shoulders while touching them, but you can’t just have a fling with a girl like that. You have to take her seriously and be a gentleman. I was willing to be a gentleman, but after breaking down the door to find that girl’s dead dad, I wasn’t at all interested in being serious.

Sam Walton moved his stores into Mississippi, which ruined her father’s four-generation-old business. They were a privately held corporation, like most other businesses in Mississippi. Walmart took every advantage of the changes Ronald Reagan brought to how you raised capital in America. It became impossible to beat him because he could sell products for less than your cost and do it long enough to drive you out of business when he could then raise the prices to whatever he wanted. Walmart was sued for this several times, but since Reagan, nobody has had much interest in enforcing the old Antitrust Laws, even though they were still in the books. If it sounds like I’m bitter about this, you might be right.

She married a boy from Ole Miss, and I never did anything about it. Once out of college, I became overwhelmingly involved in the lives of two blondes who weren’t particularly interested in me but felt like their lives were in a crisis that only I could resolve. I didn’t even like them that much, but a lady’s tears can motivate me to do just about anything. After that, I didn’t even consider getting married for ages. My only hope was to move to California and start over. Despite several long trips over, it never came to fruition. I made some great friends there, but sometimes, you need to build up an escape velocity to get out of Mississippi, and there was always something to break my momentum.

Forty years later, I would have lunch downtown with the Greek girl’s father at a restaurant owned by another multigenerational Greek family. Jackson had mostly restaurants owned by Greek families, but no Greek restaurants until Kristo’s came along. Like Katheryn Stockett’s grandfather, he mostly wanted to talk to me about people who weren’t alive anymore and a Jackson that didn’t exist anymore. You’d be surprised how often that happens.

I think, of all the things I’ve been called through the years, “Traveler” is probably the most relevant. I travel through time, picking up stories and pieces of people’s lives. Sometimes, I’ll meet them again forty years later and show them the piece of their life I collected and kept safe in my collection of stories.

There’s a woman in my dreams with raven black hair and obsidian black eyes. I don’t think she exists, but I’ve been talking about her for as long as I can remember. Sometimes, ghosts and memories are better company than anybody.