“I’ve been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down.” – Bob Dylan

They were sitting on the steps of William Faulkner’s grand old mansion, just the two of them. No one else was around.

William Faulkner himself definitely wasn’t around, at least not in the flesh, since he’d passed out of this mortal coil about twenty-eight years earlier. The mansion, Rowan Oak, was now owned and operated by the University of Mississippi, not too far away.

If you don’t know who William Faulkner is, it’s okay. For the purposes of this story, all one needs to know is that he lived in and wrote about the U.S. South across the first half of the twentieth century and beyond, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949/’50 for doing so, AND HE RICHLY DESERVED that prize and any other prizes you can think of.

Local wags who knew Faulkner in Faulkner’s own day had dubbed him Count No ’Count. It meant Count No-Account and it was intended as a slur against Faulkner because he generally ignored everyone else in the town both before, and after, he became “famous.”

There were some people in the town that he liked.

But he was a sensitive soul (you would have to be in order to produce all the great writing which he produced, up to and including getting yourself awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature four years before Hemingway himself did, which really pissed off Hemmie even though he rarely admitted it, although he did admit it sometimes, especially when he was in his cups).

Faulkner was a sensitive soul, and he had discovered that most people, one way or another, insulted his writing, even when they were trying to compliment it.

And that is a hard fate to bear. Even for the guy who wrote “The Bear,” one of the greatest novellas in English of all time.

In France right now, William Faulkner is as popular as France’s own Marcel Proust and as Edgar Allan Poe is. Even in the South, on his own home turf, Faulkner’s fame cannot come anywhere near to touching what he has achieved in a separate nation far across the seas.

Although I’ve never been there in person and never will be there in person, most likely, I still say (because of Faulkner, and Poe) long live France! (Sometimes I feel like I must’ve lived there in a former life, and now I’m just an exile; both of my grandfathers were French Canadians recently transplanted to the USA.)

…

The main character in this story was twenty-two years old at the time this story takes place; and the other main character was twenty-three.

It, or they, were a he and a she, or a her and a him, and though they both thought they were completely “grown up” at the time (of course), neither one of them had any idea how young they still were.

The year was 1990. No one on the Planet, and by that I mean no one on the Planet at all, had any idea how much the world was about to change in the next few decades.

But only young people of any era would’ve ever done what these two did next.

They went around to the back side of Faulkner’s house, broke in through a window, and climbed into the old mansion that still had most of the original furnishings in it from decades and decades ago when Faulkner and his family had lived here together.

The act of breaking into a decaying plantation mansion that had once been an utter ruin which Faulkner purchased for five hundred bucks in the 1920s and then refurbished, over decades, all by himself, did something to the young man and the young woman who are this story’s heroes.

Before they knew what was what they were rolling around all over the floor in Faulkner’s former dining room and then they rolled under the dining room table together, there on the thick carpet, luxuriously glued to one another, making out.

Back then they still loved “making out,” which meant kissing, hugging, holding, and exploring each other for hours on end without even going “all the way” sometimes.

When they burst forth from Faulkner’s house again a few hours later, both of them were so full of health and life and youth and happiness that they literally were glowing (people had told them more than once in the bars that they literally had a visible aura) with strength, joy, confidence, fearlessness, and a full-on open-hearted appetite for whatever the world had in store for them.

…

Which is not to say that they were always perfectly happy with one another, at all.

For instance, she had been far from perfectly happy with him a few days ago when he almost drove the car straight off a dock into the ocean and killed both of them. Accidentally.

They had driven all the way down to Mississippi from Chicago because they wanted to see William Faulkner’s famous haunted mansion. But once they got to Oxford, Mississippi, they realized that the ocean itself was only a few hundred more miles away, after all.

So without discussing it for more than five minutes, they made the impulsive decision to skip over Faulkner’s famous haunted mansion for now, drive down to the ocean and check it out, then swing around and head back to the mansion tomorrow or whenever.

In 1990, everything they needed for this road trip was inexpensive and affordable, including gasoline for the small, fuel-efficient car they were driving, diner food, cheap motels, cigarettes, music tapes purchased at truck stops for the cassette player and, of course, alcohol.

But he’d been driving too much at this point. She had helped out with the driving periodically, but he did ninety percent of it. And he had been driving for so many hours now without a real break, that he suddenly realized he couldn’t even figure out how many hours it had been. She was sleeping in the passenger seat. He rubbed his bleary eyes and lit another cigarette and continued to drive. He took a swig of the cold, stale coffee he had at his side and stubbed the cig’ out in the ashtray, accidentally burning his index finger. As he was doing so, he looked up to notice that THE OCEAN WAS RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF THEM AND THEY WERE ABOUT TO DRIVE OFF AN INDUSTRIAL DOCK STRAIGHT INTO IT, meaning the dark, pounding waves of the ocean. He had been circling around trying to find a better road and he’d known they were in the ocean’s vicinity because he could smell it but there were no towns around and it was blackest-night cloud-dark and he was a Northerner who’d never even been to Mississippi or any other Deep South state except Georgia and Florida for that matter.

He SLAMMED on the brakes and the car stopped with its nose right over a thirty-foot drop straight down into the black ocean water, the salt waves nailing the sides of the drop and spraying up over the hood of the car.

She was jerked forward and stopped by both the seatbelt but first his arm which flung out rightward to protect her. Yes: his arm was faster than the seatbelt.

After she almost murdered him about seventy different ways, she finally snuggled into his shoulder and let him continue driving on into the night in the other direction.

…

On the way back north to Faulkner’s haunted mansion the next day, they took another detour and went through the Delta so they could see the place where Muddy Waters and all the other Delta blues greats like Mississippi John Hurt and hundreds or thousands of others are from. And they saw that the Delta now looks much like the Delta did then, and that every time two roads cross one really does think of Robert Johnson who made a deal with the devil at the crossroads so he could play so good. Homeric Mississippi is, by far, the poorest state in the Union and it is also, far and away, the place (if you had to choose one place) which has produced American music itself. Not only Muddy Waters but also Elvis Presley are from Mississippi. Without Muddy and Elvis, no rock and roll as we know it, without rock and roll as we know it no Beatles, without the Beatles no ’60s, without the ’60s no world as we know it now. Mississippi is the underdog, the lowliest one, the slave state of slave states, the most insulted and injured of all the states, the one place that looks more like Africa than any other state, too. And from here has come the one and only art form America ever truly invented other than the cinema and the short story (Poe again), rock and roll, of which rap and hip hop are only developments, extensions. As so often in life, it turns out the lowliest one is in many ways the greatest one of all, by far.

They rolled out of the Delta and back into Oxford, Mississippi, just as the sun was going down. Their mission now was to locate another cheap motel but first they spent a few hours that turned into a few more hours drinking, smoking, and telling tales to each other and others in the bars with the jukebox always being fed.

All the cheap motels seemed to have NO VACANCY signs a-glowing as they went out looking for a place to bed down for the night. It was past midnight by now, and she was worried he’d do something stupid like almost drive off the edge of the world into the abyss of night and chaos again. As they drove out toward the edge of town, both of them noticed a large, bright, white hotel lit up like something out of The Great Gatsby and with the bright-red VACANCY sign on.

They both walked into the lobby and literally were blown back in their tracks, stunned and terrified, when they saw what it was they saw, standing there in the lobby.

The four things they saw standing there in the lobby at first seemed like four creatures straight out of the Book of Revelation come to life out of nowhere. They almost looked like they could move, and like they were about to move, to pounce, that is.

It was four African lions, two males and two females, stuffed and kept in huge, massive, glinting glass cases.

The lions’ unexpected presence here made them so uncanny that both the main characters in this story suddenly felt like they’d entered Neverland and Wonderland simultaneously with their spirits jerked around into the sixth dimension.

Their paws were beyond massive. Their legs were so powerful it chilled your soul. Their bodies were so lean, huge and muscular that it was unbelievable. Their incredibly long tails stuck straight out behind them. The manes of the men were more impressive than anything humans have ever built and the faces of the ladies were so serious and serene that it was like being doused in holy water thrown in your face and eyes just looking at them.

The young man and the young woman who are the main characters of this story were crushed by the utter horror of the tragedy of these four lions killed and stuffed and stuck in glittering cases in the lobby of this Mississippi-Gatsby hotel. At the same time, the beauty of these creatures, even in death, even in this condition, was so profound that it was like entering a green primeval forest filled with sunlight to be in their presence, maybe even the Garden of Eden. And then they realized that the lions were in heaven. And then they knew that the four lions were angels.

The boy and girl, because they both had been transformed back into their even more youthful selves right now, both went around and around and around the four lions, again and again and again: studying the lions, talking to the lions, being terrified of the lions, being in awe of the lions, consoling the lions, asking forgiveness of the lions, reaching out as if to pet the lions, laughing with them, thanking them, praising them, then standing there silently holding hands and staring at the four lions. The sleepy desk clerk had disappeared somewhere when he realized these two were in their own little world and he didn’t care.

But then the desk clerk re-emerged and the two of them grew up again and were twenty-two and twenty-three again as they got a room, floated up three flights of stairs, floated down the hallway, found their white room, unlocked the white door, floated into the white room, and peacefully attacked each other. She fell down onto the gigantic bed with all the pillows behind her head while stripping off her shirt and he fell down gently into her arms after peeling off his own shirt and the waves came and the private magic started all over again, a private magic that cannot be described and will not be described and could never be described and shall never, ever be described and that would result in the birth of healthy, glowing twins when she was thirty-nine years old sixteen years later at which time the private magic, that kind of magic anyway, disappeared from the earth forever, gradually and then suddenly.

Let me repeat that: it disappeared from the earth (from their world) forever. Amor fati, Nietzsche’s great concept, means (in English) love of fate and one real thing it means is that we must love it when good things go away from us as much as we loved it when good things arrived, whether we like it or not. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, and to die is different from what anyone supposed, said Walt Whitman. And luckier.

There are very many kinds of death in this world and one of those kinds is the death of your former self, and former selves, uncountable; but the ghosts of the past still live on in Mississippi.

The Drifter (Images by The Drifter)