‘Ouch!’ the rich queer said and fell on the ground. That hurt, and the rich queer began begging for his life.
‘Spare me! Spare me! I’m just a lonely little rich queer who wanted to have some fun. I never hurt anyone.’
‘Stop blubbering,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘And give me all your money and the keys to your car. That’s all I want anyway, you rich queer.’
The rich queer gave Lee Mellon $235.00 and the keys to his car and his watch.
Lee Mellon hadn’t said anything about the rich queer’s watch, but figuring that his birthday was coming up soon, he’d be twenty-three, Lee Mellon took the watch and put it in his pocket.
The rich queer was having the greatest time of his life. A tall, young, good-looking, dashing, toothless raider was taking all his money and his car and his watch away.
It would make a wonderful story to tell his other rich queer friends. He could show the bump on his head and point to the place where his watch had been.
The rich queer reached up and felt the bump on his head. It was rising like a biscuit. The rich queer hoped the bump wouldn’t go away for a long time.
‘I’m going now,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘And you sit right where you are until tomorrow morning. If you move an inch, I’ll come back here and run over you a couple of times with my car. I’m a desperate man, and I like nothing better in this world than to run over rich queers.’
‘I won’t move until tomorrow morning,’ the rich queer said. This made sense to him. After all Lee Mellon did appear to be quite a mean man, for all his good looks.
‘I won’t move an inch,’ the rich queer promised.
‘That’s a good rich queer,’ Lee Mellon said and abandoned the car in Monterey and took a bus on into San Francisco.
When I met the young raider for the first time, he had been on a four-day drunk with his confiscated funds. He bought a bottle of whiskey and we went into an alley to drink it. Things are done like that in San Francisco.
Lee Mellon and I yakked up a storm and became close friends immediately. He said he was looking for a place to live. He still had some of the rich queer’s money left.
I said that there was a vacant room for rent under the attic where I lived over on Leavenworth Street, and Lee Mellon said, howdy neighbor.
Lee Mellon knew that there was no danger of the rich queer ever going to the police. ‘The rich queer’s probably still sitting down there at Big Sur,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘I hope he doesn’t starve to death.’
Augustus Mellon, CSA
THE FIRST TIME I met Lee Mellon the night went away with every totem drop of the whiskey. When dawn came we were down on the Embarcadero and it was raining. Seagulls started it all, that gray screeching, almost like banners, running with the light. There was a ship going someplace. It was a Norwegian ship.
Perhaps it was going back to Norway, carrying the hides of 163 cable cars, as part of the world commerce deal. Ah, trade: one country exchanging goods with another country, just like in grade school. They traded a rainy spring morning in Oslo for 163 cable car hides from San Francisco.
Lee Mellon looked at the sky. Sometimes when you meet people for the first time, they stare at the sky. He stared for a long time. ‘What?’ I said, because I wanted to be his friend.
‘Just seagulls,’ he said. ‘That one,’ and pointed at a seagull, but I couldn’t tell which one it was for there were many, summoning their voices to the dawn. Then he said nothing for a while.
Yes, one could think of seagulls. We were awfully tired, hung over and still drunk. One could think of seagulls. It’s really a very simple thing to do . . . seagulls: past, present and future passing almost like drums to the sky.
We stopped at a little cafe and got some coffee. The coffee was brought to us by the world’s ugliest waitress. I gave her an imaginary name: Thelma. I do things like that.
My name is Jesse. Any attempt to describe her would be against my better judgment, but in her own way she seemed to belong in that cafe with steam rising like light out of our coffee.
Helen of Troy would have looked out of place. ‘What’s Helen of Troy doing in here?’ some longshoreman would have asked. He wouldn’t have understood. So Thelma it was for the likes of us.
Lee Mellon told me that he was born in Meridian, Mississippi, and grew up in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina. ‘Near Asheville,’ he said. ‘That’s Thomas Wolfe country.’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
Lee Mellon didn’t have any Southern accent. ‘You don’t have much of a Southern accent,’ I said.
‘That’s right, Jesse. I read a lot of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kant when I was a kid,’ Lee Mellon said.
I guess in some strange way that was supposed to get rid of a Southern accent. Lee Mellon thought so, anyway, I couldn’t argue because I had never tried a Southern accent against the German philosophers.
‘When I was sixteen years old I stole into classes at the University of Chicago and lived with two highly cultured young Negro ladies who were freshmen,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘We all slept in the same bed together. It helped me get rid of my Southern accent.’
‘Sounds like it might do the trick,’ I said, not knowing exactly what I was saying.
Thelma, the world’s ugliest waitress, came over and asked us if we wanted some breakfast. The hotcakes were good and the bacon and eggs were good and would fill you up. ‘Hit the spot,’ Thelma said.
I had the hotcakes and Lee Mellon had the hotcakes and the bacon and eggs and some more hotcakes. He did not pay any attention to Thelma and continued to talk about the South.
He told me that he had lived on a farm near Spotsylvania, Virginia, and had spent a lot of time as a child going over the places where the Battle of the Wilderness had been fought.
‘My great grandfather fought there,’ he said. ‘He was a general. A Confederate general and a damn good one, too. I was raised on stories of General Augustus Mellon, CSA. He died in 1910. The same year Mark Twain died. That was the year of Halley’s Comet. He was a general. Have you ever heard of General Augustus Mellon?’
‘No, but that’s really something,’ I said. ‘A Confederate general . . . gee.’
‘Yeah, we Mellons have always been very proud of General Augustus Mellon. There’s a statue of him some place, but we don’t know where it is.
‘My Uncle Benjamin spent two years trying to find the statue. He traveled all over the South in an old truck and slept in the back. That statue is probably in some park covered with vines. They don’t pay enough respect to our honored dead. Our great heroes.’
Our plates were empty now like orders for a battle not yet conceived, in a war not yet invented. I said farewell to the world’s ugliest waitress, but Lee Mellon insisted on paying the check. He took a good look at Thelma.
Perhaps he was seeing her for the first time, and as I remember, he hadn’t said anything about her while she was bringing the coffee and breakfast to us.
‘I’ll give you a dollar for a kiss,’ Lee Mellon said while she was giving him the change for ten dollars of the rich queer’s rock-on-the-head money.
‘Sure,’ she said, without smiling or being embarrassed or acting out of the way or anything. It was just as if the Dollar Lee Mellon Kissing Business were an integral part of her job.
Lee Mellon gave her a great big kiss. Neither one of them cracked, opened or celebrated a smile. He did not show in any manner that