11/22/63: A Novel Read online

  And one more thing. In North Carolina, I stopped to gas up at a Humble Oil station, then walked around the corner to use the toilet. There were two doors and three signs. MEN was neatly stenciled over one door, LADIES over the other. The third sign was an arrow on a stick. It pointed toward the brush-covered slope behind the station. It said COLORED. Curious, I walked down the path, being careful to sidle at a couple of points where the oily, green-shading-to-maroon leaves of poison ivy were unmistakable. I hoped the dads and moms who might have led their children down to whatever facility waited below were able to identify those troublesome bushes for what they were, because in the late fifties most children wear short pants.

  There was no facility. What I found at the end of the path was a narrow stream with a board laid across it on a couple of crumbling concrete posts. A man who had to urinate could just stand on the bank, unzip, and let fly. A woman could hold onto a bush (assuming it wasn’t poison ivy or poison oak) and squat. The board was what you sat on if you had to take a shit. Maybe in the pouring rain.

  If I ever gave you the idea that 1958’s all Andy-n-Opie, remember the path, okay? The one lined with poison ivy. And the board over the stream.

  2

  I settled sixty miles south of Tampa, in the town of Sunset Point. For eighty dollars a month, I rented a conch shack on the most beautiful (and mostly deserted) beach I had ever seen. There were four similar shacks on my stretch of sand, all as humble as my own. Of the nouveau-ugly McMansions that would later sprout like concrete toadstools in this part of the state, I saw none. There was a supermarket ten miles south, in Nokomis, and a sleepy shopping district in Venice. Route 41, the Tamiami Trail, was little more than a country road. You had to go slow on it, particularly toward dusk, because that’s when the gators and the armadillos liked to cross. Between Sarasota and Venice, there were fruit stands, roadside markets, a couple of bars, and a dancehall called Blackie’s. Beyond Venice, brother, you were mostly on your own, at least until you got to Fort Myers.

  I left George Amberson’s real estate persona behind. By the spring of 1959, recessionary times had come to America. On Florida’s Gulf Coast, everybody was selling and nobody was buying, so George Amberson became exactly what Al had envisioned: an authorial wannabe whose moderately rich uncle had left him enough to live on, at least for awhile.

  I did write, and not on one project but two. In the mornings, when I was freshest, I began work on the manuscript you’re now reading (if there ever is a you). In the evenings I worked on a novel that I tentatively called The Murder Place. The place in question was Derry, of course, although I called it Dawson in my book. I began it solely as set decoration, so I’d have something to show if I made friends and one of them asked to see what I was working on (I kept my “morning manuscript” in a steel lockbox under my bed). Eventually The Murder Place became more than camouflage. I began to think it was good, and to dream that someday it might even see print.

  An hour on the memoir in the morning and an hour on the novel at night still left a lot of time to be filled. I tried fishing, and there were plenty of fish to be caught, but I didn’t like it and gave it up. Walking was fine at dawn and sunset, but not in the heat of the day. I became a regular patron of Sarasota’s one bookstore, and I spent long (and mostly happy) hours at the little libraries in Nokomis and Osprey.

  I read and reread Al’s Oswald stuff, too. Finally I recognized this for the obsessive behavior it was, and put the notebook in the lockbox with my “morning manuscript.” I have called those notes exhaustive, and so they seemed to me then, but as time—the conveyor belt on which we all must ride—brought me closer and closer to the point where my life might converge with that of the young assassin-to-be, they began to seem less so. There were holes.

  Sometimes I cursed Al for forcing me into this mission willy-nilly, but in more clearheaded moments, I realized that extra time wouldn’t have made any difference. It might have made things worse, and Al probably knew it. Even if he hadn’t committed suicide, I would only have had a week or two, and how many books have been written about the chain of events leading up to that day in Dallas? A hundred? Three hundred? Probably closer to a thousand. Some agreeing with Al’s belief that Oswald acted alone, some claiming he’d been part of an elaborate conspiracy, some stating with utter certainty that he hadn’t pulled the trigger at all and was exactly what he called himself after his arrest, a patsy. By committing suicide, Al had taken away the scholar’s greatest weakness: calling hesitation research.

  3

  I made occasional trips to Tampa, where discreet questioning led me to a bookmaker named Eduardo Gutierrez. Once he was sure I wasn’t a cop, he was delighted to take my action. I first bet the Minneapolis Lakers to beat the Celtics in the ’59 championship series, thereby establishing my bona fides as a sucker; the Lakers didn’t win a single game. I also bet four hundred on the Canadians to beat the Maple Leafs in the Stanley Cup Series, and won … but that was even money. Chump change, cuz, my pal Chaz Frati would have said.

  My single large strike came in the spring of 1960, when I bet on Venetian Way to beat Bally Ache, the heavy favorite in the Kentucky Derby. Gutierrez said he’d give me four-to-one on a gee, five-to-one on a double gee. I went for the double after making the appropriate noises of hesitation, and came away ten thousand richer. He paid off with Frati-esque good cheer, but there was a steely glint in his eyes that I didn’t care for.

  Gutierrez was a Cubano who probably didn’t weigh one-forty soaking wet, but he was also an expat from the New Orleans Mob, run in those days by a bad boy named Carlos Marcello. I got this bit of gossip in the billiard parlor next to the barbershop where Gutierrez ran his book (and an apparently never-ending backroom poker game under a photograph of a barely clad Diana Dors). The man with whom I’d been playing nineball leaned forward, looked around to make sure we had the corner table to ourselves, then murmured, “You know what they say about the Mob, George—once in, never out.”

  I would have liked to have spoken to Gutierrez about his years in New Orleans, but I didn’t think it would be wise to be too curious, especially after my big Derby payday. If I had dared—and if I could have thought of a plausible way to raise the subject—I would have asked Gutierrez if he’d ever been acquainted with another reputed member of the Marcello organization, an ex-pug named Charles “Dutz” Murret. I somehow think the answer would have been yes, because the past harmonizes with itself. Dutz Murret’s wife was Marguerite Oswald’s sister. Which made him Lee Harvey Oswald’s uncle.

  4

  One day in the spring of 1959 (there is spring in Florida; the natives told me it sometimes lasts as long as a week), I opened my mailbox and discovered a call-card from the Nokomis Public Library. I had reserved a copy of The Disenchanted, the new Budd Schulberg novel, and it had just come in. I jumped in my Sunliner—no better car for what was then becoming known as the Sun Coast—and drove up to get it.

  On my way out, I noticed a new poster on the cluttered bulletin board in the foyer. It would have been hard to miss; it was bright blue and featured a shivering cartoon man who was looking at an oversized thermometer where the mercury was registering ten below zero. GOT A DEGREE PROBLEM? the poster demanded. YOU MAY BE ELIGIBLE FOR A MAIL-ORDER CERTIFICATE FROM UNITED COLLEGE OF OKLAHOMA! WRITE FOR DETAILS!

  United College of Oklahoma sounded fishier than a mackerel stew, but it gave me an idea. Mostly because I was bored. Oswald was still in the Marines, and wouldn’t be discharged until September, when he would head for Russia. His first move would be an effort to renounce his American citizenship. He wouldn’t succeed, but after a showy—and probably bogus—suicide attempt in a Moscow hotel, the Russians were going to let him stay in their country. “On approval,” so to speak. He’d be there for thirty months or so, working at a radio factory in Minsk. And at a party he would meet a girl named Marina Prusakova. Red dress, white slippers, Al had written in his notes. Pretty. Dressed for dancing.

  Fine for him,
but what was I going to do in the meantime? United College offered one possibility. I wrote for details, and received a prompt response. The catalogue touted an absolute plethora of degrees. I was fascinated to discover that, for three hundred dollars (cash or money order), I could receive a bachelor’s in English. All I had to do was pass a test consisting of fifty multiple choice questions.

  I got the money order, mentally kissed my three hundred goodbye, and sent in an application. Two weeks later, I received a thin manila envelope from United College. Inside were two smearily mimeographed sheets. The questions were wonderful. Here are two of my favorites:

  22. What was “Moby’s” last name?

  A. Tom

  B. Dick

  C. Harry

  D. John

  37. Who wrote “The House of 7 Tables”?

  A. Charles Dickens

  B. Henry James

  C. Ann Bradstreet

  D. Nathaniel Hawthorne

  E. None of these

  When I finished enjoying this wonderful test, I filled out the answers (with the occasional cry of “You’ve got to be shitting me!”) and sent it back to Enid, Oklahoma. I got a postcard by return mail congratulating me on passing my exam. After I had paid an additional fifty-dollar “administration fee,” I was informed, I would be sent my degree. So I was told, and lo, so it came to pass. The degree was a good deal better looking than the test had been, and came with an impressive gold seal. When I presented it to a representative of the Sarasota County Schoolboard, that worthy accepted it without question and put me on the substitute list.

  Which is how I ended up teaching again for one or two days each week during the 1959–1960 academic year. It was good to be back. I enjoyed the students—boys with flattop crewcuts, girls with ponytails and shin-length poodle skirts—although I was painfully aware that the faces I saw in the various classrooms I visited were all of the plain vanilla variety. Those days of substituting reacquainted me with a basic fact of my personality: I liked writing, and had discovered I was good at it, but what I loved was teaching. It filled me up in some way I can’t explain. Or want to. Explanations are such cheap poetry.

  My best day as a sub came at West Sarasota High, after I’d told an American Lit class the basic story of The Catcher in the Rye (a book which was not, of course, allowed in the school library and would have been confiscated if brought into those sacred halls by a student) and then encouraged them to talk about Holden Caulfield’s chief complaint: that school, grown-ups, and American life in general were all phony. The kids started slow, but by the time the bell rang, everyone was trying to talk at once, and half a dozen risked tardiness at their next classes to offer some final opinion on what was wrong with the society they saw around them and the lives their parents had planned for them. Their eyes were bright, their faces flushed with excitement. I had no doubt there was going to be a run on a certain dark red paperback at the area bookstores. The last one to leave was a muscular kid wearing a football sweater. To me he looked like Moose Mason in the Archie comic books.

  “Ah wish you was here all the time, Mr. Amberson,” he said in his soft Southern accent. “Ah dig you the most.”

  He didn’t just dig me; he dug me the most. Nothing can compare to hearing something like that from a seventeen-year-old kid who looks like he might be fully awake for the first time in his academic career.

  Later that month, the principal called me into his office, offered some pleasantries and a Co’-Cola, then asked: “Son, are you a subversive?” I assured him I was not. I told him I’d voted for Ike. He seemed satisfied, but suggested I might stick more to the “generally accepted reading list” in the future. Hairstyles change, and skirt lengths, and slang, but high school administrations? Never.

  5

  In a college class once (this was at the University of Maine, a real college from which I had obtained a real BS degree), I heard a psychology prof opine that humans actually do possess a sixth sense. He called it hunch-think, and said it was most well developed in mystics and outlaws. I was no mystic, but I was both an exile from my own time and a murderer (I might consider the shooting of Frank Dunning justified, but the police certainly wouldn’t see it that way). If those things didn’t make me an outlaw, nothing could.

  “My advice to you in situations where danger appears to threaten,” the prof said that day in 1995, “is heed the hunch.”

  I decided to do just that in July of 1960. I was becoming increasingly uneasy about Eduardo Gutierrez. He was a little guy, but there were those reputed Mob connections to consider … and the glint in his eyes when he’d paid off on my Derby bet, which I now considered foolishly large. Why had I made it, when I was still far from broke? It wasn’t greed; it was more the way a good hitter feels, I suppose, when he is presented with a hanging curveball. In some cases, you just can’t help swinging for the fences. I swang, as Leo “The Lip” Durocher used to put it in his colorful radio broadcasts, but now I regretted it.

  I purposely lost the last two wagers I put down with Gutierrez, trying my best to make myself look foolish, just a garden-variety plunger who happened to get lucky once and would presently lose it all back, but my hunch-think told me it wasn’t playing very well. My hunch-think didn’t like it when Gutierrez started greeting me with, “Oh, see! Here comes my Yanqui from Yankeeland.” Not the Yanqui; my Yanqui.

  Suppose he had detailed one of his poker-playing friends to follow me back to Sunset Point from Tampa? Was it possible he might send some of his other poker-playing friends—or a couple of muscle boys hungry to get out from under whatever loan-shark vig Gutierrez was currently charging—to do a little salvage operation and get back whatever remained of that ten thousand? My front mind thought that was the sort of lame plot device that turned up on PI shows like 77 Sunset Strip, but hunch said something different. Hunch said that the little man with the thinning hair was perfectly capable of green-lighting a home invasion, and telling the black-baggers to beat the shit out of me if I tried to object. I didn’t want to get beaten up and I didn’t want to be robbed. Most of all, I didn’t want to risk my pages falling into the hands of a Mob-connected bookie. I didn’t like the idea of running away with my tail between my legs, but hell, I had to make my way to Texas sooner or later in any case, so why not sooner? Besides, discretion is the better part of valor. I learned that at my mother’s knee.

  So after a mostly sleepless July night when the sonar pings of hunch had been particularly strong, I packed my worldly goods (the lockbox containing my memoir and my cash I hid beneath the Sunliner’s spare tire), left a note and a final rent check for my landlord, and headed north on US 19. I spent my first night on the road in a decaying DeFuniak Springs motor court. The screens had holes in them, and until I turned out my room’s one light (an unshaded bulb dangling on a length of electrical cord), I was beset by mosquitoes the size of fighter planes.

  Yet I slept like a baby. There were no nightmares, and the pings of my interior radar had fallen silent. That was good enough for me.

  I spent the first of August in Gulfport, although the first place I stopped at, on the town’s outskirts, refused to take me. The clerk of the Red Top Inn explained to me that it was for Negroes only, and directed me to The Southern Hospitality, which he called “Guff-pote’s finest.” Maybe so, but on the whole, I think I would have preferred the Red Top. The slide guitar coming from the bar-and-barbecue next door had sounded terrific.

  6

  New Orleans wasn’t precisely on my way to Big D, but with the hunch-sonar quiet, I found myself in a touristy frame of mind … although it wasn’t the French Quarter, the Bienville Street steamboat landing, or the Vieux Carré I wanted to visit.

  I bought a map from a street-vendor and found my way to the one destination that did interest me. I parked and after a five-minute walk found myself standing in front of 4905 Magazine Street, where Lee and Marina Oswald would be living with their daughter, June, in the last spring and summer of John Kennedy’s life. It
was a shambling not-quite-wreck of a building with a waist-high iron fence surrounding an overgrown yard. The paint on the lower story, once white, was now a peeling shade of urine yellow. The upper story was unpainted gray barnboard. A piece of cardboard blocking a broken window up there read 4-RENT CALL MU3-4192. Rusty screens enclosed the porch where, in September of 1963, Lee Oswald would sit in his underwear after dark, whispering “Pow! Pow! Pow!” under his breath and dry-firing what was going to become the most famous rifle in American history at passing pedestrians.

  I was thinking of this when someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I almost screamed. I guess I did jump, because the young black man who had accosted me took a respectful step backward, raising his open hands.

  “Sorry, sah. Sorry, sho din mean to make you stahtle.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Totally my fault.”