Milking the Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

where I come from.
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    I feel like I’ve overlapped several civilizations and several centuries. When I was a small child, there were still Confederate veterans marching down Government Street on Memorial Day—men who’d been teenage boys in the War Between the States. There was one old gentleman my grandmother would take me to visit, who had a chamber pot with a picture of U. S. Grant in the bottom. And my first history lesson with Miss Maude Simpson, whose daddy was killed at Second Bull Run: Columbus discovered America, George Washington chopped down a cherry tree, and then this War Between the States broke out.
    But the Mobile I grew up in during the 1920s was still a French port city. Mobile was French, Spanish, and English, but the French were strong. You would never know it now except for the street names and the fact that the old downtown is laid out on a grid. It is not laid down according to where the bayou flowed. It is Bienville Square, things going east and west, things going north and south—it’s a French layout. When I was a child there were still more French names. A lot of them are still around, but somehow there is no feeling of it being a French city. First World War, Second World War, all those peasants in the fields came to work in the shipyards and built Baptist churches on every corner. But back then Mobile was quite a place. The twenties were roaring here like they were everywhere. There were rumrunners on the Bay and moonshiners in the woods. And seventeen bordellos on State Street and St. Anthony Street.
    And how I wish I could really have known Mobile, not just as a child, in the days of those great restaurants—and they were great: the wine lists went on forever—and all those bars, those theaters going full blast, and the circuses, and the tent shows, and the magicians, and the fortune-tellers. I think I’d like that.
    My cousins the Schimpfs had a restaurant on Dauphin Street. There were 280-something dishes on the menu, and they were all cooked to order. They had the first refrigerator anywhere on the Gulf Coast. There was always a whole side of venison in there, thousands of hams, guinea hens. And they had a wonderful wine list. They got cases off of ships from here and ships from there because Mobile was an old-fashioned port. And the customs inspector—if you gave him a bottle of wine, he would look upriver when you came in with cases of wine.
    And of course there were the whorehouses. Nobody said “whorehouse”; they said “Miss Edna’s place” or “Miss Minnie’s place.” Now most ladies—three or four children, two dogs, one servant, household to clean, laundry—they were so glad if the boys went and got it off before they came home at night. Boys have to get their rocks off every eight to twenty-four hours. It’s not my idea—Mother Nature made them that way. And the Gulf Coast understood that in a way the Baptist country does not. The minute a woman realizes the way Mother Nature has made all healthy male creatures, then the expectations of romance, courtship, marriage, shared real estate, or vacations in the mountains take on a more relaxed air. But the bordellos were not just for copulation. It was where the boys went to shoot dice and play cards. And do the political gossip of Mobile. Because the gentlemen couldn’t shoot dice at home with mothers or wives. Even some card games were forbidden. So they were clubs where you went to play cards or shoot craps or talk politics or just drink moonshine.
    The bordellos were really one of the greatest deterrents to crime because if those sailors had been on those boats a month, they were ready to copulate. And instead of finding a town with no bordellos, nothing but bars where they would get drunk and fight and kill each other or kill whoever was passing, in Mobile they could have a good fuck and then drink and be happy. Then there are all these mad country boys dying for a blow job. And their born-again Baptist wives