Cracker Etiquette: Stories from Somebody's South by Philip Booth

Cracker Etiquette: Stories From Somebody’s South by Philip Booth A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: John Fleming, Ph.D. Rita Ciresi, M.F.A. Phillip Sipiora, Ph.D. Date of Approval: April 10, 2006 Keywords: florida, fiction, key west, movies, rock and roll © Copyright 2006, Philip Booth Table of Contents Abstract ii Introduction 1 Smile 11 Cracker Etiquette: A Sort-of Memoir 30 Just a Kiss 45 Falling 62 The Night Frank Sinatra Saved Pop’s Life 75 What the Neighbor Saw 86 i Cracker Etiquette: Stories From Somebody’s South Philip Booth ABSTRACT It might be said that the Old South and the New South meet in this collection of stories, largely set in Florida and centered on characters whose lives are tied to the state. The protagonists, mostly men and boys, are often observed during moments of crisis. The middle-aged narrator of “Falling,” sifting through bittersweet memories, attempts to come to terms with a loved one’s loss, the impact of that tragedy on his life, and the burden of misplaced guilt. In “Smile,” a young man struggles with an uncaring lover and makes a fateful decision about a stash of stolen money during a strange trip to Key West, a journey spiked with pop-culture references and viewed through the haze of LSD. A romance between a good woman and a hard-drinking man, begun during the 1940s, is at the center of “Cracker Etiquette: A Sort-of Memoir,” which visits largely- forgotten times and places in Old Florida and rural Georgia. The rules of romance, circa the 1980s, are examined in “Just a Kiss,” a story of twenty-something sexual frustration and emotional angst set in Tampa and indebted, in part, to a Hemingway story. An entirely different milieu is explored in “The Night Frank Sinatra Saved Pop’s Life,” which takes place at a New Jersey family’s beach house in South Florida and centers on a Mafia hit man’s retelling of his long-ago encounter with the Chairman of the Board. ii “What the Neighbor Saw,” the most psychedelic of these stories, and one of the author’s oldest pieces of fiction, closes the collection with a murder mystery told from the point of view of a disturbed suburbanite. These tales offer a unique perspective on a South that may have existed only inside one writer’s mind. iii Introduction “Journalism is literature in a hurry,” the Victorian poet and literary critic Matthew Arnold wrote. As a longtime journalist, I’ve always subscribed to that view, believing that the news reporting of, say, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in The Washington Post on the fall of the Nixon White House was every bit as compelling as the finest fiction of the period. Theirs was a bracing narrative filled with a fascinating cast of characters, an engaging true-life story that began with secrets and lies at the highest levels of government, continued with unraveling careers and concluded with the fall of a once- mighty ruler. No wonder the resultant book, All the President’s Men, and the movie of the same name, inspired so many writers of my generation to pursue careers in journalism. Fertile, stunningly told stories, too, drawn from real life and driven by engaging narrative arcs, are also to be found in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the other non- fiction work of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson; Tom Wolfe’s true-life countercultural explorations in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and elsewhere; the long- form journalism of Norman Mailer, including his The Armies of the Night; and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, born as a series of articles in The New Yorker. In recent months, fascinating, deeply moving stories of tragedy, survival and hope have emerged from Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans and the Gulf coast, 1 in the pages of publications as varied as The New Orleans Times-Picayune, The New York Times and No Depression magazine; these kinds of richly woven, emotionally resonant tales, too, emerged in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City. Journalism and literature have always been connected in another, perhaps more obvious way, too: Talented journalists, like Mark Twain, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway and, more recently, the Florida crime writer Carl Hiaasen, moved beyond newspapers to become formidable creators of fiction. The hard, sometimes monotonous work of reporting – gathering facts, seeking out sources, interviewing people, running into dead ends, analyzing information, relating the results to the public as entertainingly as possible – paid off for these writers, and many others. They were each able to successfully transition from the craft of recounting and illuminating the deeds and lives of real people to the art of fabricating and enlivening characters who may or may not bear remarkable resemblances to people living or dead. So that was the path I had in mind when I made my first serious attempts at fiction writing, about the same time that I was admitted to the University of South Florida’s graduate program in English, in the fall of 2003. I had successfully worked in the field of journalism, as a staff writer and a full-time freelancer, and over a period of two decades I had written hundreds, if not thousands of news stories, feature stories and reviews for dozens of daily and weekly newspapers, magazines and Web publications around the country. As a journalist, I knew how to give readers – and, more importantly, editors – what they wanted, or what they thought they wanted, and at the same time satisfy my own sense of storytelling. And I hoped that I could accomplish the same thing with literary fiction. 2 I had studied literature, too, and in graduate school I explored Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the modernists; Mailer, Jack Kerouac, Paul Bowles, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Franzen, and other contemporary novelists; the sci-fi worlds of Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick; and, variously, Dickens and Twain. In creative writing classes, I delved into the stories of John Updike, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Andre Dubus, Stuart Dybek, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Louise Erdrich, Bobbie Ann Mason, Alice Munro, Denis Johnson, Sandra Cisneros, Mark Costello, Lorrie Moore and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, among many others, attempting to understand how and why their short fiction worked for readers, and what skills and techniques might be useful in my own work. On my own, I eagerly consumed the tough-guy crime writings of Elmore Leonard and James Lee Burke, the psychological crime thrillers of Patricia Highsmith and the pulp horror of Stephen King; the tales of Southern grotesques in the work of Gainesville writer Harry Crews and New Orleans writer John Kennedy Toole; and the portraits of Northern grotesques in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. I reveled in the comic strains of British social satirist Kingsley Amis, and such forebears as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene; and the more darkly tinted work of Amis’s son, so-called “Britpack” writer Martin Amis. The short stories and novels of Russell Banks, who brought a sculptor’s knife to his beautifully crafted work centered on bleak themes and characters who often struggle with family dysfunction and addiction, perhaps have had more of an influence on my writing in recent years than the work of any other author. I also learned much from the storytelling found in contemporary screenplays, particularly those that were the basis for the work of the filmmakers who were part of 3 Hollywood’s creative renaissance of the ‘70s – Francis Ford Coppola, Stephen Spielberg, Robert Altman, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, Paul Mazursky and Stanley Kubrick – along with several who emerged in the ‘80s, including Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, John Sayles and Oliver Stone, and ‘90s talents Quentin Tarantino, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Thomas Anderson. All of these directors to some degree have explored the nature of identity in an America whose sense of itself, of its place in the world, had lost its moorings during the political and social upheaval of the ‘60s, and had yet to be healed of its malaise. That sense of contemporary angst, a kind of non-religious spiritual suffering accompanied by an endless quest for answers, also attracted me to the tales of the drifters, losers and seekers in the music of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash and Lucinda Williams. Even artists from across the pond tapped into that feeling; it is present in the music of the latter-day Beatles, in the John Lennon and George Harrison solo projects, and in the work of modern rockers U2, who literalized that sense of lifelong spiritual questing in songs like “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Searching For” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (with the lyrics, “How long must we sing this song?”) Those artists’ secular searching, and moments of revelation, paralleled religious experiences that I had undergone in the South. As a child and young adult, I attended a variety of Protestant churches, cycling through several mainstream denominations, and as a teenager I had a “born again” experience at a summer church camp. Later, I became closely affiliated with several evangelical churches. I have never abandoned my faith, but I have gone through several phases and differing degrees of religious devotion. I have experienced feelings of similar, neo-religious spiritual transcendence while listening to 4 music, too, whether absorbing the deep, reedy woodwinds and primal percussion of the World Saxophone Quartet with African drums at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, zoning into the throbbing bass and hypnotic patterns of the bands on stage all night at Reggae Sunsplash in Jamaica, investigating the mournful laments recorded by guitarist Robert Johnson and his Delta blues musical kin or tuning into the open-ended, musically eclectic improvisations of the Grateful Dead, Phish and other jam bands that have continued to play in a similar vein.

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