One Day

Dustin Beall Smith

        But it took him a long time
        Finally to make his mind up to go home. 
                  —Elizabeth Bishop, “The Prodigal”

When I woke up I found myself standing naked on the second floor balcony of the motel. I gripped the metal railing like a deranged Caesar and prepared to address the populace. Looking out over the dimly lit parking lot, I realized there was not a soul in sight. I checked my wristwatch, then assessed the situation. For some reason, being naked at 4:00 am seemed less crucial than what I needed to say to the populace. But I couldn’t quite recall what I needed to say. In the resulting mental vacuum, the nature of my predicament began to take shape.
    I looked over my shoulder and saw that the door to my room was closed. Reflexively, I patted my bare thighs, feeling for a room key. I tested the locked door, twisting the knob with both hands, to no effect. It wouldn’t do to kick the door in, not with bare feet. Not with the star of the movie asleep in the room next to mine. No way I could just walk into the motel office and ask for a key. I would be fired for sure.
    I walked along the balcony, weighing my options. I began to imagine the news spreading on the movie set that morning. How the key grip (chief rigger and problem solver) from New York had been arrested at dawn by the Georgia State Police; charged with wandering about naked in the middle of the night; how blood tests had revealed an alcohol level like none ever recorded before; how further tests had found evidence of a nearly lethal mixture of drugs.
    Deciding to seek help from a fellow crew member, I padded down the concrete stairs, my head pounding, my mouth desert dry. I banged on door 11. Hearing only a muffled voice coming from inside, I pounded harder. “Just a minute,” yelled Joe, “just a minute!” Joe was the gaffer (head electrician); we had gotten happy together some hours earlier. I heard a toilet flush. I waited. The toilet flushed again. I pounded even harder. The toilet flushed a third time. Joe opened the door, fully dressed, prepared for a bust.
    “I need a towel,” I said.

The problem with being a drunk—and this is something I could not possibly have guessed at the time—is that, even when you stop drinking, the fact that you were a drunk will forever intrude on your assessment of the past. It is impossible to write about that time in 1976, when I helped film a movie on Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia farm, without first acknowledging that I was too much of a drunk to have read anything she had written—including the short story we were filming. For a key grip this would normally be an unnecessary confession. (Grip work is technical and has nothing to do with story line or meaning.) But I was, at the time, a thirty-five-year-old man with a dream of being a writer myself. To be sure, years of drunken inactivity had transformed that dream into a kind of ongoing, ever-more-weather-beaten expectation. Lacking any evidence that I actually was a writer and having failed enough at it to suggest that I wasn’t, I had retreated to the high ground: I simply assumed I was a writer. After all, if I could observe what I observed of life, and in such a brilliant way, wasn’t my success a foregone conclusion? Drinking fueled this assumption, revved it up nicely each night—then drove it straight into a tree. Every morning as I kneeled at the toilet to puke up green bile, I knew I had gone another day without writing. I had taken notes perhaps, while sitting at the bar—shameless observations of humans at the trough—scribbles whose chief motivation had been to seem intelligent while sucking down bourbon and beer. But while a few fortunate synaptic collisions might have produced an idea or two, those ideas—either unreadable in daylight or incomprehensible to the sober mind—were destined for the trash.
    What I am getting at here is that I brought to the experience of standing on a great American writer’s home soil a perverse and energetic dimness. Not that O’Connor herself noticed. Having been faithful to her art until the very end, she had succumbed to lupus twelve years earlier, at age thirty-nine. But had she lived she may very well have found my presence fitting, since dimness, and the way it forestalls redemption, were O’Connor’s trademark themes.

We were filming “The Displaced Person,” a story set in the rural South after World War II. Provincial ignorance, pettiness, and greed rule the lives of the central characters. The widow Mrs. McIntyre (played by Irene Worth) hires an immigrant Polish farm laborer, with an eye to replacing her dairy foreman, Mr. Shortley (Lane Smith). Seeing how eagerly the Pole works, she imagines hiring more foreigners to replace her two lazy Negroes, Astor (Robert Earl Jones) and Sulk (Samuel L. Jackson). Shortley and his wife (Shirley Stoler) conspire to get rid of the Pole. No one wins. Mrs. Shortley dies suddenly. The Pole is not-so-accidentally run over and killed by his own tractor. Mrs. McIntyre herself suffers a paralyzing stroke. Mr. Shortley and the Negroes move away. A priest, Father Flynn (John Houseman), whose advice Mrs. McIntyre has sought throughout the story, gets the last word. But Flynn is a vague and heartless man. He has no solutions, only the doctrines of the Church.
    Which was a damn sight more than I had, as I stumbled out of the crew van that hot June morning. I had missed breakfast, so I went straight to the snack table, which stood in the shade of the oak tree behind the O’Connor farmhouse. It was only seven o’clock, but slivers of intense sunlight already shot across the lawn, announcing another scorcher. I poured myself a black coffee and eavesdropped while the producer discussed the day’s schedule with assistant director Terry Donnelly.
    Having been wracked by dry heaves half an hour earlier, I sipped my coffee carefully. Afraid to open my mouth too wide, I forced half a jelly donut past my teeth, sucked it back to my esophagus, then swallowed it in several gulps, the way a python ingests a rat. I wiped the sugar from my lips and fed the rest of the donut to one of the famous O’Connor peacocks that roamed the lawn. The day before, this same peacock had refused to show his startling tail to our cameras, until I stood before him in my red-and-white striped Greek soccer shirt and strutted about like a peacock myself. He and I were buddies now.
    “Ready, Dusty?” said Donnelly.
    “Standing by,” I said. I wanted to die. I would have given a week’s salary to drop dead right there on the grass.
    “Let’s get to it then.”
    “You got it,” I said, waiting for Donnelly to lead the way.
    By the time I’d managed to maneuver the camera dolly into the tight quarters of the makeshift bedroom set, Lane Smith and Shirley Stoler were already in bed, running their lines. The two of them made a very convincing white trash couple—Lane with his dark, beady eyes and greasy undershirt; Shirley with ... well, I’ll get to that.
    The non-insulated outbuilding that served as our set felt like an oven. We had blacked out the windows. A small fan turned meekly in the doorway, managing only to tease those of us who were squeezed into the narrow space on the opposite side of the bed. I could barely breathe.
    Shirley’s character, Mrs. Shortley, was trying to make sense of the threat the Pole presented to their way of life. Intuiting that even the Negroes might be replaced by a wave of European immigrants, she was articulating a newfound altruism to her half-asleep husband: “Chancey,” she said, “turn thisaway. I hate to see niggers mistreated and run out. I have a heap of pity for niggers and poor folks. Ain’t I always had? I say ain’t I always been a friend to niggers and poor folks?”
    Shirley’s southern accent seemed less than convincing, but she conveyed, without effort, the deep-seated treachery required of her character. There was about Shirley a natural aura of resentment, either caused by her constant physical discomfort, or the cause of it—you couldn’t tell. Malice exuded from her pores on rivulets of sweat that the makeup woman daubed with tissues. The flesh on her arms was bubbly, the texture of gray matter. The excess fat on her upper arms swallowed the elbow joints entirely. At her pinched wrists the skin had bruised to the color of storm, clouds. Multiple chins overwhelmed her neck in successive waves, finally coming to rest on her chest. A mottled heat rash painted her cheeks. Her breasts rose and fell beneath her damp cotton shift as she panted in the stifling air. This was not just an overweight woman, this was an actress who seemed to have coaxed her obesity from stone, invented it, nurtured it, honored it. In her previous film she had played a brutal Nazi prison camp commandant.
    Now as Shirley lay sprawled on the dingy sheets waiting for Donnelly to quiet the set, her head rolled slowly and quite deliberately in my direction. Her gaze lingered on my crotch as she gave me the once-over from sandals to headband. Her eyes narrowed. Then, smiling as pitilessly as she might have smiled at a mosquito, she locked her eyes on mine and winked.

The great thing about being a drunk is that you get to erase causal relationships. One event needn’t be logically connected to the next. This allows you to muck about in the psychic depths and dredge up buckets of unambiguous—if inexplicable—terror. If the psyche in its normal state can be thought of as protected from such terror by a kind of civilized veneer—one that shields the normal citizen from disturbing synchronous information—then alcohol, nicotine, and cocaine can be thought of as crude prongs that scratch and tear at that veneer, exposing one to raw experience.
    Several days before Shirley winked at me, I had woken abruptly from a hangover-induced Sunday nap having dreamt that a lightning bolt struck a gold capital dome somewhere. I had been unable to make sense of the dream, but in the immediate aftermath of Shirley’s wink, I felt a residual electrical jolt. A normal man—one who allowed oxygen to aerate his blood—would probably have had no difficulty dealing with the wink. He might have sensed therein the kindness that actually did reside in Shirley’s heart and perhaps thought of her with kindness himself—taken pity on the poor woman’s smothered desire, allowed her a flirtatious lapse, maybe even winked back, thus defusing the situation—not, in any case, taking it personally.
    But I, in my dehydrated state, saw that wink as the unintelligible lightning bolt-a streak out of the unknown that illuminated something I wasn’t ready to see or prepared to comprehend: If Shirley so unabashedly desired me, then there must be a part of me that deserved that desire—matched it, so to speak. So fantastic was her visage that I must have taken her presence among us on that set as dreamlike, and in so doing opened myself up to her anima-power, as I did to all sorts of women in dreams,-taking what they had to offer—messages and all. But had I ever given this real-life woman any indication that I was interested in getting it on? Had I not made it clear every night in the local bar that the Georgia peaches who followed the crew around were more my style—and my just desserts? Had I not shown patience in my pursuit of these honeys, even though they showed far less interest in my scribbles than New York City girls? Did my past conquests not shield me from assaults like this?
    Apparently not. Like a man whose eyelids had been removed by hostile Indians, I was compelled to stare at Shirley while she sized me up—all one hundred fifty pounds of me. I returned her come-on with a stony stare, disowning her wink utterly. But a film set is an unforgiving environment. People within it are attuned to each other like iron filings in a magnetic field. When Shirley winked at me, she did so in a way that announced to everyone present not just her desire for me or her expectation of fulfillment, but a kind of done-deal-ness that seemed to suggest that her desire for me had already been fulfilled.
    Donnelly did not ask for quiet on the set. He didn’t have to. The eyes of my peers were upon me. Suddenly forced to consider where I had been the night before—before finding myself on the balcony—I blushed with all the fury of a schoolgirl.

“She wants you,” whispered Lane. “She told me so this morning. She wants you bad.”
    “That’s not even funny,” I whispered back. But secretly I was elated to hear that nothing had transpired between Shirley and me, that it was all in her mind. “She’s your wife, Mr. Shortley,” I said. “You’re the one who’s stuck with her. That’s why you get the big bucks.”
    “Hah!” he said.
    We were in the dairy barn, after lunch, preparing to film a scene in which Mr. Shortley asserts to his wife that he is not going to be intimidated by Father
Flynn’s plan to import more Polish workers. The sound man, Nigel Noble, asked Lane to read a line so he could get a decibel level. Lane cleared his throat, and read a line.
    “Right, thank you,” said Nigel, in his English accent. He took a nip from a fifth of Jack Daniels he kept hidden on the sound cart, then offered me a hit.
    I took a gulp. “Hey, Lane,” I said, “read that line again.”
    Lane gave it his best drawl: “Ain’t no Pope a Rome gonna tay-ell me how to run no day-ry.”
    We all laughed. The anxiety I had suffered since the bedroom scene was gone now. My gut felt warm. Beginning to feel a second wind, I found myself looking forward to the bar.
    The prop man, Chris Kelly, led a Guernsey cow into the barn, struggling to get it in front of the camera. Having worked on a farm when I was kid, I slapped the cow’s rump, shoved it forward into the stanchion, secured the clasp, then returned to my own work. As I bent down to unlock the wheels of the camera dolly, someone slapped my rump, hard. I spun around, ready to clock whoever it was, and saw Shirley standing there, along with the makeup woman and producer, her fat hand held out for me to take. Reluctantly, I grasped her fingers and steadied her as she stepped across the dolly track. Thanking me, she curtsied and winked again.
    I turned to Nigel. Already he was passing me the bottle.
    “Icy blue” is the way Flannery O’Connor described Mrs. Shortley’s eyes. Had I read her story at the time, I would have known that she had been tactful in her description of Mrs. Shortley’s challenged body, and that she had, in fact, created an immensely sensitive portrait of a woman whose relationship to the unconscious was not unlike my own—dim, yet charged with. receptivity. Mrs. Shortley had lightning-like visions. So did I. She maintained a constant proximity to death and a precarious relationship to the truth. So did I. She was crude but no cruder than I. And she went about assuming that she was somebody she wasn’t. So did I.
    The differences between us were just as striking: I was not a fictional character in a story. Nor was I going to be allowed, as it turned out, to exit this life at a young age. And unlike Mrs. Shortley I couldn’t blame my short-comings on my natal circumstances or on the region of America in which I was raised. I was a prep school- and college-educated man who had been brought up by well-meaning, artistic parents, in an environment of unquestioned privilege in the Northeast. Whereas Mrs. Shortley wished constantly to rid herself of the social disgrace she perceived to be her lot, I was working like mad to achieve that disgrace.
    What bridged the gap between our similarities and differences was the written (and unwritten) word. Flannery O’Connor had portrayed the dim-witted, uncomfortable-in-her-own-skin Mrs. Shortley not because she shared her bigoted sentiments but because those sentiments, when exposed, shed light on a deeper truth: that we are all in this together; that to love—to have it or give it—requires first an acknowledgment of shared humanity. O’Connor, knowing herself—and knowing her time was limited—shared her own humanity by writing about these things.
    I, in portraying to those around me the dim-wilted, uncomfortable-in-his-own-skin version of myself, was hardly that generous and brave. It would be years before I would quit drinking and begin to write. But I was, in my own way, chasing after—and held steady by—some deep need to share my lot in life with others. Beneath my drunken perversity ran a persistent and steady current: the knowledge that sooner or later I would have to account for myself—and that if all the pain I was going through were ever to prove worthwhile, I would have to put that account in writing. Already I was beginning to suspect that no amount of camaraderie at the bar was going to bring me closer to a shared humanity.
    When O’Connor’s mother, Regina Cline O’Connor, offered me iced tea on her front porch that afternoon, I nearly turned her down. The day before she ordered all the men on the crew to put their shirts on while working anywhere near the house, despite the sweltering heat. Her dictum had caused widespread resentment, and being quick to take up futile causes, I had voiced my distaste for such manipulative and arbitrary southern decorum.
    But iced tea was iced tea, and I needed badly to sit on a rocker in the shade. I accepted the perspiring glass, doily and all, and looked through the screen at the view to the west. A slight breeze carried the odor of rattlesnakes nesting in the nearby field. John Houseman, dressed as Father Flynn, and Irene Worth, made up as Mrs. McIntyre, sipped their tea on a white wicker couch nearby.
    I remember that moment vividly, perhaps because it seems so wrapped in silence, deferred until now by the things I didn’t know enough to ask, like: Mrs. O’Connor, did Flannery sit on this rocker in the days before she died? Was it hard on her to be so deathly ill and still feel compelled to write? Did writing help to shield her from a fear of death? And the things I didn’t declare, like: Your daughter is my mother’s favorite writer. Or: When I was still a boy, Flannery was living up north and writing stories a few miles from where my family lived. We swam in the same lake, she and I.

I didn’t last in the bar that night. It seemed I was invisible to the southern belles, and I just didn’t have the energy to get my tail all afluff. I ate steak and drank four or five fingers of bourbon from a beer mug filled with ice, then caught a ride back to the motel with Lane and his driver.
    Feeling proud of myself for having pulled the plug before midnight, I took a long shower, arranged my clothes for the morning, then lay down on the bed and turned out the light. Lying there in the dark, I remembered how the day had begun. I forced myself up and unlocked the motel room door—just in case I found myself out there in front of the populace again.
    Lying back down, naked atop the fresh sheets, I fell asleep in the cool of the air-conditioned room. I am not sure exactly what woke me an hour later, but it was probably the sound of a raspy breath not my own—or the strange weight drawing me into the center of the bed. I opened my eyes. There lay Shirley, mountainous beside me, her hand reaching out to stroke my face.

“One Day” appears in our Autumn 2001 issue.