PART ONE
A Confederate General from Big Sur
A Confederate General from Big Sur
WHEN I FIRST heard about Big Sur I didn’t know that it was a member of the Confederate States of America. I had always thought that Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Texas were the Confederacy, and let it go at that. I had no idea that Big Sur was also a member.
Big Sur the twelfth member of the Confederate States of America? Frankly, it’s hard to believe that those lonely stark mountains and clifflike beaches of California were rebels, that the redwood trees and the ticks and the cormorants waved a rebel flag along that narrow hundred miles of land that lies between Monterey and San Luis Obispo.
The Santa Lucia Mountains, that thousand-year-old flophouse for mountain lions and lilacs, a hotbed of Secession? The Pacific Ocean along there, that million-year-old skid row for abalone and kelp, sending representatives back to the Confederate Congress in Richmond, Virginia?
I’ve heard that the population of Big Sur in those Civil War days was mostly just some Digger Indians. I’ve heard that the Digger Indians down there didn’t wear any clothes. They didn’t have any fire or shelter or culture. They didn’t grow anything. They didn’t hunt and they didn’t fish. They didn’t bury their dead or give birth to their children. They lived on roots and limpets and sat pleasantly out in the rain.
I can imagine the expression on General Robert E. Lee’s face when this gang showed up, bearing strange gifts from the Pacific Ocean.
It was during the second day of the Battle of the Wilderness. A. P. Hill’s brave but exhausted confederate troops had been hit at daybreak by Union General Hancock’s II Corps of 30,000 men. A. P. Hill’s troops were shattered by the attack and fell back in defeat and confusion along the Orange Plank Road.
Twenty-eight-year-old Colonel William Poague, the South’s fine artillery man, waited with sixteen guns in one of the few clearings in the Wilderness, Widow Tapp’s farm. Colonel Poague had his guns loaded with antipersonnel ammunition and opened fire as soon as A. P. Hill’s men had barely fled the Orange Plank Road.
The Union assault funneled itself right into a vision of sculptured artillery fire, and the Union troops suddenly found pieces of flying marble breaking their centers and breaking their edges. At the instant of contact, history transformed their bodies into statues. They didn’t like it, and the assault began to back up along the Orange Plank Road. What a nice name for a road.
Colonel Poague and his men held their ground alone without any infantry support, and no way out, caring not for the name of the road. They were there forever and General Lee was right behind them in the drifting marble dust of their guns. He was waiting for General Longstreet’s arrival with reinforcements. Longstreet’s men were hours late.
Then the first of them arrived. Hood’s old Texas Brigade led by John Gregg came on through the shattered forces of A. P. Hill, and these Texans were surprised because A. P. Hill’s men were shock troops of the Confederate Army, and here they were in full rout.
‘What troops are you, my boys?’ Lee said.
‘The Texans!’ the men yelled and quickly formed into battle lines. There were less than a thousand of them and they started forward toward that abyss of Federal troops.
Lee was in motion with them, riding his beautiful gray horse, Traveller, a part of the wave. But they stopped him and shouted, ‘Lee to the rear! Lee to the rear!’
They turned him around and sent him back to spend the last years of his life quietly as the president of Washington College, later to be called Washington and Lee.
Then they went forward possessed only by animal fury, without any regard now for their human shadows. It was a little late for things like that.
The Texans suffered 50 per cent casualties in less than ten minutes, but they contained the Union. It was like putting your finger in the ocean and having it stop, but only briefly because Appomattox Court-house waited less than a year away, resting now in its gentle anonymity.
When Lee got to the rear of the lines, there were the 8th Big Sur Volunteer Heavy Root Eaters reporting for duty. The air around them was filled with the smell of roots and limpets. The 8th Big Sur Volunteer Heavy Root Eaters reported like autumn to the Army of Northern Virginia.
They all gathered around Lee’s horse and stared in amazement, for it was the first time that they had ever seen a horse. One of the Digger Indians offered Traveller a limpet to eat.
When I first heard about Big Sur I didn’t know that it was part of the defunct Confederate States of America, a country that went out of style like an idea or a lampshade or some kind of food that people don’t cook any more, once the favorite dish in thousands of homes.
It was only through a Lee-of-another-color, Lee Mellon, that I found out the truth about Big Sur. Lee Mellon who is the battle flags and the drums of this book. Lee Mellon: a Confederate General in ruins.
The Tide Teeth of Lee Mellon
IT IS IMPORTANT before I go any further in this military narrative to talk about the teeth of Lee Mellon. They need talking about. During these five years that I have known Lee Mellon, he has probably had 175 teeth in his mouth.
This is due to a truly gifted faculty for getting his teeth knocked out. It almost approaches genius. They say that John Stuart Mill could read Greek when he was three years old and had written a history of Rome at the age of six and a half.
But the amazing thing about Lee Mellon’s teeth is their strange and constantly moving placement in the many and varied dentures those poor teeth briefly get to call home. I would meet him one day on Market Street and he would have just one upper left tooth in his face, and then I’d see him again, months later on Grant Avenue, and he’d have three lower right teeth and one upper right tooth.
I’d see him again just back from Big Sur, and he’d have four upper front teeth, and two lower left teeth, and then after a few weeks in San Francisco, he’d be wearing the upper plate without any teeth in it at all, wearing the plate just so he would have a head start on gristle, and so that his cheeks wouldn’t collapse in on his mouth.
I’ve adjusted to this teeth fantasia always happening to him, and so now everytime I see him, I have a good look at his mouth to see how things are going with him, to see if he has been working, what books he has been reading, whether Sara Teasdale or Mein Kampf, and whom he has been sleeping with: blondes or brunettes.
Lee Mellon told me that once in Modern Times, he’d had all his teeth in his mouth at the same time for a whole day. He was driving a tractor in Kansas, back and forth across a field of wheat, and his brand-new lower plate felt a little funny in his mouth, so he took it out and put it into his shirt pocket. The teeth fell out of his pocket, and he backed the tractor over them.
Lee Mellon told me rather sadly that after he had discovered that the teeth were gone from his shirt pocket, it took him almost an hour to find them, and when he found them, they weren’t worth finding at all.
The First Time I Met Lee Mellon
I MET MELLON five years ago in San Francisco. It was spring. He had just ‘hitch-hiked’ up from Big Sur. Along the way a rich queer stopped and picked Lee Mellon up in a sports car. The rich queer offered Lee Mellon ten dollars to commit an act of oral outrage.
Lee Mellon said all right and they stopped at some lonely place