Drinking with George

or the Wilson Pickett Moment

June 15, 2011

We’d like to share with you a George W.S. Trow moment.

It’s the Tuesday before Thanksgiving 1996 and we’re drinking with George, or more properly, continuing to drink, and George is smoking, ‘smoking like a chimney,’ as they say. Something classic and harsh, something unfiltered. Lucky Strikes, “L.S./M.F.T.” [2] We’ve been drinking most the day, it’s now late afternoon and the sun is sinking starboard as we sit on the elevated back porch balcony of his beautifully designed and ‘custom-built’ neo-Federalist château nestled among the rolling hills of his beloved Germantown. [3] We’d begun our drinking in an empty late morning tavern at ye olde Clermont Inn [4] with a succession of Genesee [5] drafts sharing a fine mutual solitude with Everett, the silent (save for his police band scanner) barkeep.

George insists we proceed to lunch at Bobby’s Bistro for George’s own venison meatloaf [6] It is excellent and allows us to continue drinking and talking for the rest of the afternoon. George had been working on a new book [7] and polishing—as they say— a chapter he’s calling “Devastation: Release from My Father’s Tradition.”

We’re telling you this just to give you an idea of where we were holding and the context of our conversation. George would often work out his ideas in dialogue, and we were privileged for a season to be a part of this process.

GEO: You know, I realized no one loved Ike [8] more than me when Bob Dole went on Saturday Night Live. I mean this guy has been… an good for him, but he’s not an avatar of Ike, I’m sorry. Sorry. Not if he doesn’t understand the fundamental alienness to that aesthetic of going on Saturday Night Live. Y’know?

US: Well it was desperation.

Yeah—

And that’s very un-Ike.

Very un-Ike.

Very un-Ike.

All the guy had to do was just go off, just leave.

Yeah—

Do nothing.

Yeah—

Y’know and be mysterious for people. I mean “what would Bob Dole have done?” “Who is Bob Dole?” [9]

Well we’ve never seen him on Saturday Night Live.

That’s right, it’s so important. And people miss these simple… I’ve turned so against the President and First Lady. [10] I wanna say evil, but they can’t be evil yet. But they’re just in the first… y’know they’ve been hugged by evil a couple of times and they haven’t rejected the hug. Y’know? And it doesn’t have anything to do with FDR or Kennedy or even Johnson… it makes me… well it doesn’t. The funny thing is I was going to say, it makes me feel so sick. Now it’s like freedom.

Freedom from the dictatorship of the corporate two-party system. When Ike was around, there were still distinctions that could be made, labor versus business. Yr vote mattered. Choices could be made. It’s about choicelessness now.

That’s right, it’s very interesting. Essentially his rôle, which people partly understood was… it was the real paternal role, it was the ‘I’ll handle this, you do what you want.

The Great White Father.

It isn’t yr job to deal with this, I’ll deal with this. Be decent, but I don’t have any particular advise for you.’

Go to work, raise yr families—

That’s right. And I’m not particularly critical. I think fundamentally he was an extremely uncritical person, and I love that. And Neal [11] had that too, y’know.

Fundamentally human, some elemental soulful aspect to Ike. He was as soulful as any Delta blues guy in his white man way.

Did I tell you about the Wilson Pickett Moment?

When he called you Ike?

Eisenhower. [12]

Eisenhower, yeah—think that musta been a pivotal moment.

It was huge. It was a huge moment for me—and it was Pickett saying it to me, y’know…

Well he might be yr truest teacher—

Instant said, the moment I walked in—[sotto voce] Ike. His **** was hanging out. He had his ganger [13] out. I mean, if that wasn’t enuf for me I mean it was not to be ignored. It was deeply not to be ignored.

Definitely a backstage soul man kinda revelation.

O my gawd—the hawks, there’s three of them. [above us circling]

Are they hawks or are they crows? —they’re crows.

They must be crows [14] — “Wilson Pickett visiting!” [George breaking here into his signature maniacal laugh] “Ah hahhahahahahah-hahhahahahah—usually I have hawks.”

1. New Yorker, January 23, 1971, “‘Talk of the Town: Back to the Apollo.’ Talk story about a visit to the Apollo Theater on W. 125th St., in Harlem. Writer tells about how in the fifties when he was 15, he had gone to the Apollo to see Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers. The night on which he went this time, offered Wilson Pickett…” by George W. S. Trow (text grab from the New Yorker website)

2. L.S./M.F.T. “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.” A slogan that appeared on the bottom of every cigarette pack. It replaced “It’s toasted” at some point in the 1940s. Lucky Strike sponsored The Jack Benny Show on both radio and early television. “So round, so firm—so fully packed. So free and easy on the draw.”

3. Directions to George Trow’s house— 9 North from Red Hook, Columbia County: Clermont—on left: Clermont Inn with bar–left on County Route 8; 2 miles—left fruit orchard, on right little red house; past first road Hill ‘n’ Dale on right—over top of hill down on right with meadow—two tracks thru.

4. Ye Clermont Inn on US Route 9, Germantown, NY

5. Best local beer, best green bottle. The Genesee Brewery was founded in Rochester, New York in 1878.

6. It being deer season and George’s friend Steve, who he occasionally breakfasts with at Bobby’s and who is a hunter and had just the day before killed two does with one shot and given George some of that two-for-one-flesh that George proceeded to grind and bake into a meatloaf and deposit this meatloaf with Bobby who could then serve it to George and Steve for lunch, but Steve didn’t show and so we were the designated diners that day.

7. “Mexico Lindo,” an unpublished manuscript, portions of which were folded into My Pilgrim’s Progress (Pantheon, 1998).

8. This is the requisite contemporary dumb-down footnote, therefore the subscript—Ike is of course DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER (1890–1969), longtime Army general and 34th President of the United States of America. He was in office from 1953–1961, the heyday of Rhythm & Blues. Our whitest president presides over the ascent of our blackest culture. Yeah, the fifties were so conformist, let’s put that canard to rest.

9. Former Senate Majority Leader from Kansas. Republican party nominee in the presidential election of 1996. Lost to the incumbent Bill Clinton, which brings us to our next footnote—

10. That would be the tag team Bill and Hillary.

11. NEAL CASSADY (1926–1968) American autoist/monologist who just happened to be proximal here on January 9, 1949 which is the date penciled on the postcard of Ye Old Clermont Inn. He and his literary friend were mid-voyage on an historic road trip. We shared with George a similar appreciation of all things Neal and are certain he would have grokked on the confluence of transcript and illustration here. Hello George.

12. Eisenhower, Ike, which is it? George miscorrected us initially, bridling perhaps at our familiarity with his story. It had to be made new in that moment so we cudn’t have remembered it correctly. The magical moniker of course is ‘Ike.’ But consider the times. 1971 I’d posit as the very height of the so-called Black Power movement. Pickett had grown up in the pre-Civil Rights Deep South. This may just be how he received his backstage guests, straight an queer. Country boy must get lucky often enuf.

13. ****, yes—as in bird, faucet, penis. But ganger? We’d never heard this one before. Great word, sounds large, Vitalitarian. Search yr Eric Partridge in vain, you’ll not find ganger. (Jacob Brackman: Maybe George made it up. George, laughing: Why not?)

14. When George went to the Apollo Theater to do his ‘Talk of the Town’ piece in 1971 he was invited backstage to meet the soul singer whereupon entering the dressing room Pickett greets him in hushed bemusement— “Ike.” What was it? The physical resemblance? The Caucasianal amplitude? Whatever it was, it was freighted with prophetic insight for George. But how could he mistake the Wilson Pickett crows for the Eisenhower hawks? These two poles of cultural relativity provided George a link, one that while contradictory on the surface, shared a deep complementarity. This is the crux of the biscuit. This is the ontological binary that drives us ever ‘furthur.’ It’s not to be trifled with or reified in scholarly glosses. It’s to be ‘walked-out,’ Baptist-style. Or as Mr Wilson Pickett insists so emphatically, “ninety-nine and a half just won’t do.”

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The King Shabazz Literary Collective was the loose affiliation of a single high-functioning multivalent autist who wish’d to remain anon back in twenty-eleven. “King Shabazz” is the main character in Lucille Clifton’s children’s book, The Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Spring. EP Dutton 1973.