Parade Day
“Good Morning Ladies. Feist-Dog says it’s parade day.”
There are two group chats I say good morning to every day. One has my niece in it, and the other has the Little Bird. Most of what I do is so that young women born in Mississippi might find a reason to stay in Mississippi. That I do it under the watchful eye of their mothers is part of the magic. I recognize that I couldn’t love their mothers, especially my sister, as much as I could have, or more importantly, should have.
Believing that Uncle Boyd was too strong to ever need help, or even love, I let him get all sorts of broken, and in my brokenness, I wasn’t able to do what was so vitally important, like helping God’s own precious little girls grow up.
When Collins was in diapers, she walked around on top of the kitchen table, scolding each of us in a baby language none of us could speak anymore. I have no idea why she was scolding the others, but I have a pretty good idea why she scolded me. It was probably pretty hard to believe Uncle Boyd loved her when he just wasn’t there.
I was in the first St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Jackson. I didn’t plan on it. I was in it because Inez said I could. So was my brother, and Mr. Bonehead. Since Mr. Bonehead and I were not at all paying attention, my brother kept me and Mr. Bonehead from getting decapitated by street lights. “Teenage boy in three-piece suit loses head in parade accident.” The Clarion Ledger never backed down from putting Campbell kids on the front page when they did something stupid.
I’m not sure that getting my head knocked off would have stopped me. Malcom and Pat might have some ‘splaining to do. From what I understand, they barely had a permit as it was. Paralegals in stiletto heels came out of their offices like “what da hell?” That was part of the fun in that first parade.
Mary Sanders’ mom posts a photo of what she and Mary Sanders will wear at the parade. I’m pretty jealous of her jacket. Leaving a comment, I say, “Your child owns every part of my heart.”
That one of my theater kids now runs the parade, Hal & Mals AND Campbell’s Bakery is something I’m pretty proud of. Her spouse is pretty cool. You watch my word, at some point in our history, Damien will be able to display a James Beard award at the ole’ Jackson wattterin’ hole.
Besides all the other cool shit Mary Sanders does, she’s also one of Mississippi’s top designers. There are two types of designers in Mississippi. There’s the “successful sorority member at Ole Miss who is now pretty good at picking cute pillows and knows which artist is popular and culturally acceptable to put on your wall”, and then there are artists. Mary Sanders is an artist.
She’s not just an artist. She speaks to the same sort of mid-century aesthetics that became part of my life. We call it “Modern,” but it’s really pretty old now. You have to separate “Modern” from “Contemporary”, although the latter has a sort of out-of-date connotation too.
There was a time when Mid-Century Modern bespoke the idea that “this is a new Mississippi.” It was an important idea. It took some time for Mississippi to evolve beyond the tragic disaster of the Civil War. It’s like we clung to the past so tightly that we forgot to live. Forgetting to live is how you die. Trust me on this one.
I’ve always had a close affinity with designers. They were a key element of Missco’s Commercial Furniture Division. There were two companies that manufactured and sold “Office systems,” what you might call “cubicles.” Most people were Steelcase dealers. They were the largest. They had the most government contracts. Contracts are such an important part of that business that it’s often called “contract furniture.” That was literally the name on the folders at Missco. That’s how we divided things.
Courted by Steelcase, Daddy went with Herman Miller. Herman Miller, he explained to me, had more “artistic integrity.” Daddy believed me doing art was dangerous. That’s what “alcoholics and homosexuals do” (he’s not entirely wrong), it’s also what my schizophrenic brother did.
Of the two, I chose alcoholism over homosexuality. The Little Bird asked if I was ever bisexual. I think, except for the kissing part, I might have tried it. I don’t know how men kiss each other without ripping their faces apart. Beards are tricky. In high school, I always made sure I didn’t return somebody’s teenage daughter with a chapped and red face, for fear their fathers would know what we were up to.
I “dated” several designers. One of my favorites was twelve years older than me. Bill Clinton was courting her at the same time I was. I won. The governor of Arkansas lost. Suck it, bitches. I think the deciding factor was that I wasn’t married. That we could discuss art styles as they related to American History meant she captured every bit of my attention.
Taking her to the black tie “Zoo Party.” We may or may not have committed a carnal act in the tunnel where you used to be able to see them feed the giraffes. Talking about what to do with the Zoo in the future, I’m 100% against keeping large animals like Giraffes. The ethics of zoos have changed.
Daddy clearly had an artistic eye. He just, well, he just, to do the things he wanted to do for Mississippi, and for the family, he just needed to keep a “practical mind,” and insisted that Uncle Boyd did too. I’m trying to find a way to say these things without making him sound like an asshole.
Both of my parents loved me beyond reason, but I was an incredibly difficult child to love. Still am. Even though things in Mississippi had gotten many times better, I was born into a culture literally afire. They were murdering people for trying to vote the week before I was born, just a few blocks from where I was born. Things got better. Things got considerably better, but sacrifices had to be made.
There was a stretch when Missco was really doing well financially. Daddy put together a budget and told Pat Jeffreys to travel to all the colleges in Mississippi and buy art from the top students. It ended up being almost 250 canvases and about 30 dimensional art pieces. It’s a lot harder to display dimensional art.
Moving from our old South Street location, part of which is now Cathead Vodka, we built a ginormous mid-century modern facility in West Jackson. We used the same concrete molds that were used to build the new Country Club of Jackson, which was also Mid-Century Modern, although most of its vestiges have now been redesigned. Antebellum designs are back in; Mid Century Optimism is out. Dunno why.
Deciding that daddy hadn’t redesigned his office in twenty years, Pat Jeffreys and Jan Manger spent months talking him into a remodeling. Daddy tended to stick to what he liked. Jan, a friend of Sarah Jones, was a remarkable designer. Sarah, I would say, was Jackson’s first designer with any sort of legitimate art training. She was amazing. Among other things, she handled the first remodel of the Mayflower restaurant. Her children weren’t too bad either.
Daddy wanted to keep the furniture, including his desk, because it was a gift from Herman Miller, including the Eames Chair, where he could nap for precisely forty-five minutes every afternoon. A design feature of the Eames Chair is that it’s so comfortable you can take a nap, but not so comfortable that you can get a night’s sleep.
Picking what art to display, Daddy said, “I dunno, call Jackie.”
Jackie Meena was our across-the-street neighbor. Her father, Locke, had been the CFO of Missco and one of my Uncle Boyd’s best friends. Jackie Meena was one of the original members of the Jackson Painting Housewives Coalition. That’s a name I came up with, and it in no way should be taken as a judgment or a dismissal.
The message of the second wave of feminism was that women should make lives for themselves, beyond the hearth. The Jackson Painting Housewives Coalition decided that the life they would build was art. I don’t think there were ever times that Jackie’s income from art matched her surgeon husband’s, but it was close. Al Meena took out my appendix. It wasn’t infected; it kept moving to the wrong spot and blocking my colon from evacuating. A 12-year-old with chronic constipation isn’t a good thing.
Jackie mastered every medium, but her favorite was mixing watercolor with ink. I’ve been experimenting with the same thing. She’s a lot better than me. Briefly, she and the other members of the Painting Housewives went into the Art Supply business. Missco wholesaled to them. In that position, Jackie could get ginormous sheets of cold-press paper. Just the paper on some of her paintings could cost a hunnert bucks.
Cold-pressed paper has a rough surface, and it’s extremely absorbent. (Think paper towels.) Dealing with watercolors, both of these qualities are important. They’re also why watercolor is so tricky.
At Fondren Public, Little Bird tells me about trying to teach watercolor to first graders. Since I had once been in the elementary school supply business, I had opinions. Long before she was born, I was dating elementary school teachers. I married one. My recommendation was always that tempera paints (fake egg tempera) were better for little artists because they’re easier to control, the pigments can be fairly dense, and they’re not that expensive. Plus, you can eat the entire bottle and not have health problems, although their little poops might be rainbow for a few days.
She’s remarkably smart. Explaining the concept of wet-on-wet, where you soak the paper before you begin, made a lot of sense to her. There’s no way this child couldn’t be brilliant. I know something about her genetic heritage.
“What do you mean when you say you climbed up buildings? Like Spiderman? Are you Spiderman?”
“More like King Kong.”
I create a truthful, but fictionalized version of the Little Bird for my stories. I enjoy seeing my readers meet her in the flesh. For one thing, she’s not a little girl, she’s a full-growed woman. I’ve forgiven her for that.
The fictionalized versions of myself are either “Uncle Boyd,” “The Poor Knight,” or “The Great Beast.” The Great Beast is pretty clearly recreating myself as King Kong. I was really little when I first encountered King Kong. The image of him trying to understand why blood was coming out of his chest while he protected Fay Wray from these New York versions of Pteranodons has never left me.
“How can I be dying while I’m trying to do the right thing?” Then Kong fell thousands of feet, and broke the pavement on Fifth Avenue.
I think I was in the first St. Paddy’s Day Parade because I didn’t plan to. Allowing myself the space to just be myself was, for many years, the hardest thing I knew. It’s very likely why I drank so much. Nobody wanted Boyd The Artist. They needed a businessman, political leader, and philanthropist. I did my best to fill those roles, but I forgot to feed my own soul.
Trying to be politically active again, I have a problem. I’m a Bull Moose republican. Like the Triceratops, we’re supposed to be extinct. We went extinct because nobody wanted us. We were too bland, I guess. Bull Moose (or progressive) Republicans believe government should be small, all the way around. Small especially in economic matters, but also non-existant in cultural matters. We also believe most of a nation’s wealth shouldn’t pool in the hands of just a few people. That’s easy enough to fix with a tax code that genuinely favors the middle class. People keep promising us that, and then they keep failing to deliver.
I don’t know what I’m gonna do. Just switching parties doesn’t solve the problem. In some ways, it makes it worse. Daddy always refused to say which party he was in, so he could take what he wanted from both. I’m not in a position to do that. National politics annoy me. I’m in it for Mississippi. That’s enough of a problem in itself. There are people not from Mississippi, but from both ends of the political spectrum, trying to buy Mississippi’s political future. I’m not particularly friendly toward this idea.
I was in a few of the subsequent parades after the first, but that was usually the result of people who somehow knew I could paint, sculpt, and do lighting. These are all skills necessary in building a float. I never would initiate the idea myself. Being artistic was something I was afraid of. Doing things to enjoy because I enjoyed them was kind of forbidden.
After the Edwina Goodman show, I told The Little Bird that I could have had a place in the art world, but I was afraid of it. A lot of times, I don’t say things because they make me sound like a conceited asshole. Saying that I might actually be good at writing and art falls into that category. Even now, I don’t think I’m good. I think I have unrealized potential. The difference between what I’m doing now and what I was doing when I was Little Bird’s age is that now, I’m trying to develop that potential.
Having pizza with my friend’s precious child, my close friend, I lament not promoting myself when I was young. A tear falls for the life I could have had if I believed in it.
Every day, Daddy said, “I’m so proud of you, Buddy,” and every day, he tried to make me into something I wasn’t, because it was “safe.” Safer than what I had in mind, I guess.
One day, the scales fell from Daddy’s eyes. “You’re dying, aren’t you, Buddy?” In my entire life, that was the first moment I ever felt truly seen by my father. That year, he had a record-breaking wedding to plan for my sister and a smaller wedding for my brother. Those things had to happen for my siblings before Uncle Boyd could do anything to take even a small piece of that spotlight. They deserved it. The plan was to announce that Boyd was leaving Mississippi in June. Daddy died in April. All the best laid plans of mice and men...
The life of an artist isn’t safe. Among other things, your head just explodes. Mine did that anyway, but I contained the explosion, so it ended up making a big mess in a small room, but no art. I’ve never been afraid of pain. I ran to it like a hungry dog to dinner. “Hit me! Hit me!” That would have been such a great attitude for an artist, but I had to be something else; I had to be the Second Boyd Campbell.
One thing I’ve always admired about William Goodman, even though he’s still kind of a little boy in my eyes, is that he never really bore the burden of being the third Bill Goodman. He just became what he wanted to become. Boy, that’d be nice, huh?
I can only understand the universe through art. A lot of my family and friends read my work, a little worried about what I’ll say about them. I try to say only good things about the people I love. Only things I’m proud of them for. Still, it’s gotta be a shock to see your name in print, even if it’s not your name.
With the Little Bird and The Everything Kid, I’ll send them Substack links. “You’re in this one. I love you.” They kinda dig the experience. When I wrote about Michael, he said it really touched him to feel seen by somebody my age. That was actually why I wrote the story about him.
Not everybody is into it, though. I’m working pretty hard to figure out how to navigate that. To me, I’d really love to buy and paint billboards that spell out when and why I’m so fucking proud of people, but that might get annoying if you’re one of the people.
I didn’t do many parades because I enjoyed doing parades. That sounds stupid, but it’s true. A number of factors combined to conspire and keep me from enjoying my life. I don’t blame anyone. I was estranged from my Mom, but it wasn’t about that. I don’t blame anybody. I could have just told them all to go to hell and run my life as best I could, but I didn’t. Whatever came of that, it falls on me. It’s not like I’ve ever been afraid to tell people to fuck off; we’re doing things my way.
When I create, when I paint, or draw, or write, or sculpt, or design lights, or even pick art for my walls, or put together a playlist on Spotify, it’s an act of pure love. A broken child, I am filled beyond capacity with true and enduring love for so many people. The only way I can express it is through art.
I’ve drawn the Little Bird a few times. I have photos to do a few more. I’d love to draw the Everything Kid. I have photos of my sister’s children I want to paint. Now that I’m drawing or painting every day, I’m gonna need subjects. One photo I really like shows my sister and her daughter in the same profile, the same palette, the same expression, songs of innocence, songs of experience. That will be a painting. Probably soon.
I used to know people who would say, “Draw me like one of your French girls.” That never works out the way they think. What does work is to just kind of live your life and take lots of pictures. I can use snapshots to make pretty good art.
Feist-Dog says it’s Parade Day. I’m probably not gonna go. I was in the first one because Inez said I could. I think that one memory satisfies me.
