Not Your Average “Good Ole Boy”
I discovered Jack through stories from/about The Buds (“Buddies,” “Budweisers”), the gang
my husband Hamp ran with at Topsail Beach, North Carolina, during high school and college.
Jack became “6-12” when, at fourteen, he lured an older girl onto the ocean pier “one dark,
windy night,” tied her pedal pushers to a piling, and generously applied the insect repellent he
was sufficiently Boy-Scout-prepared not to be without. The epithet “Blue Blaze” attested to his
mastery of fart-lighting, to which I was somewhat privy via my mother’s story of a Raleigh cop
whose sister, when they were children, blazed his fumes until his shorts scorched and Hamp’s
own initiation into the Scouts—they held him down and farted in his face. (The inspiration was
doubtless William Byrd and Benjamin Franklin.)
My best firsthand knowledge I call “Jack-from-the-Box by the Dawn’s Early Light.” We’d
taken our first teaching positions at Drake University, and, one Saturday morning, Jack
telephoned that he was on his way to the Atlanta airport and would be in Des Moines at 8:05
P.M. He called again about 5:30 for Hamp to pick him up.
After my Beef Wellington and trifle, Hamp took Jack to a “get-together” given by
psychology graduate students to find him a date for a dinner party at our house Sunday evening.
Hamp came home early. He’d introduced Jack around and hadn’t seen him again. Dawn
volunteered to return him to us.
Hamp was hardly through his recital when Jack and Dawn arrived. I thought he was kidding
when he suggested that Hamp and I go to bed. We finally got the point but had hardly buffed
and bedded and were still giggling when Jack knocked on our door to borrow an alarm clock.
Dawn had to baby-sit a faculty member’s kids at 6:00 Sunday morning. Hamp saluted getting up
at the “crack of Dawn,” and Jack left pantomiming threats. I was mostly worried about Dawn.
“Not Your Average ‘Good Ole Boy’” 1
Hamp was her professor, and she must feel a little weird under such circumstances. She was
gone when we got up but would join us for dinner. Alcohol had so affected Jack’s performance
high that he would have demanded a two-night stand even without our plans.
We asked people who wouldn’t be offended by an invitation at the nth moment, those we
could show off to Jack and vice versa, and the youngish and different. These included Mr. (and
Mrs.) Rising-Poet-of-the-English-Department and Dr. (and Mrs.) New-York-Jewish FellowPsychologist. The Chicken Kiev and chocolate soufflé would go well, and, at the right degree of
drink, Jack would be infinitely witty (e.g., he never “bathed under his arms” but “put his goats
out to pasture.”) Hamp and I sat back to let our concoction mellow. The poet held court all
evening. The Jewish couple had just had a kid to talk about, and she hated Des Moines
passionately. Obviously bored, they left early. Jack and Dawn sat by themselves and tittered.
Around 1:00 A.M., Hamp left to take The Poet and his wife home—they didn’t believe in cars
but traveled on bicycles by daylight.
By the time I returned from seeing them out the back door, Jack and Dawn were in his
bedroom. I puttered about the living room emptying ashtrays and then started on the dishwasher.
Apparently Jack didn’t realize I hadn’t gone with Hamp. He was suddenly framed, naked, in the
kitchen doorway. I threw him a dishtowel—deemed by Hamp a grand put-down! Dawn excused
herself from seeing Jack again.
When Hamp accompanied me to a Donne convention in Atlanta, Jack met us at the airport
with a bottle of champagne on ice in a gallon bucket on the back floor of his red Thunderbird
convertible. He also treated us to an old-fashioned, multi-coursed Southern meal he prepared
himself. He was sharing an apartment with another bachelor, sleeping on a huge water bed, and
raising his own marihuana plants. He told us he was dying from hypoglycemia and had seen
“Not Your Average ‘Good Ole Boy’” 2
Dawn again. She’d gone to the University of North Carolina for her doctorate. Jack was
smuggling drugs from Atlanta to New York by airplane and had arranged to meet her at the
Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill. While they were asleep, someone entered their room and stole a
huge sum of money from one of his shoes. Hamp shushed me before I could ask how huge it
could be if it fitted in a shoe.
I never understood Jack and women. Maybe his appeal was his looks: short, plumpish,
Scandinavian-WASPy, . . . teddy-bearish. With some regularity, he lost his license for a year,
generally for “drunk driving,” and hooked up with a female who chauffeured him around under
the illusion that they would marry once he was again able to fend for himself and her. When we
saw him in Atlanta, his date was a Valdosta girl he’d picked up at an apartment mixer. That was
their first date. The next weekend, she tried to move in his apartment. After he returned to the
beach, she flew up for the weekend to attend the Azalea Festival.
Jack was in Vietnam when Hamp and I married. Our first summer at the beach together, we
met the girl he was engaged to, but she fizzled out like all the others. The next summer, when
we made our annual pilgrimage from Iowa to the beach cottage we’d bought from my mother-inlaw, Jack was back home. His mother spent winters on the mainland, some twenty miles away,
and summers on the island, and he lived with her.
The first time I met Jack, Hamp and I were awakened after midnight by someone pounding
on the door. Hamp came back to tell me to dress—it was Jack and a local wife he was seeing
home from a party. By the time I joined them, Jack had passed out on the couch. Hamp left to
take the lady home, and I sat there watching the body and hoping it wouldn’t wake up but
thinking what an adventure if it did.
So it began. Every summer for our six-week stay, Jack would be at our house several times a
“Not Your Average ‘Good Ole Boy’” 3
day and often ate dinner with us. I heard all the stories, not just from Hamp and Jack, for, sooner
or later, most of the old crew showed up at our place.
Jack’s best friend was Tom Whitfield, whose family had a business and a home on Topsail.
Quick Jack could talk himself out of any situation or at least leave solid Tom to take its blame.
Tom had access to the family car, but Jack could never con his mother out of hers. He’d get
Tom to drive him to Wilmington by asking, “Don’t you want SOME?” But Tom always got left
in the car on his lonesome. Jack kept him in a perpetual state of agitation in his uninformative
years. In fact, the only times Tom was ever able to pay him back Jack didn’t know about. When
they were in grammar school, they’d take a skiff over to Old Topsail, an uninhabited island close
to the beach, to camp out. Tom used their Welch’s grape jelly and Duke’s mayonnaise for
immoral purposes.
Tom nicknamed Jack “Horace Joe,” and became in turn “Dudley Do-right” (or just
“Dudley”), ostensibly because he’d always get beer-drunk at the parties and “preach,” grossing
out everybody. One night at our cottage, Jack was sitting on the porch railing and fell backwards
twelve feet to the ground. Everybody thought he was dead and not just dead-drunk. Instead, he
got up, brushed off the sand, and announced calmly, “Horace Joe ain’t gonna do that no more.”
During a party at Hamp’s, Jack stole the “Dudley Dumpster,” a truck belonging to Tom’s
father, and brought everybody outside by blowing the horn, then started riding it over the dunes.
Tom found a monkey wrench and was going to “kill-the-son-of-a-bitch-the-minute-he-caughthim.” Soon, the island cops, Tom, Tom’s father, and all the party people were in pursuit. Jack
would laugh, give them the finger, and gun her over the next dune. They caught him when he
gave out of gas. Usually, though, the parties ended with Jack passed out and their having to take
him home and prop him up under a tree at his mother’s cottage. When everybody was back in
“Not Your Average ‘Good Ole Boy’” 4
the car, they’d blow the horn and take off.
One summer while we were at the beach and a group had gathered at our place, Jack, wellinebriated, hooked up our PA system.
After reciting a mishmash of nursery rhymes, he
unleashed a battery of four-letterers that brought irate neighbors to our front door the next
morning.
Present that night were the reigning beach nerd and his wife. Pearce Crutchfield was the son
of a prominent islander and had managed to marry beneath him and, unluckily for her, get a
really first-class girl. He was the one who, as a teenager, bragged about his drinking prowess
and finesse but was never the wiser when Jack served him vinegar and water in a Scotch bottle.
Much to Hamp’s dismay, he was then in graduate school in psychology and had brought along
his cattle prod as a badge of status. Later, when he was a Teaching Assistant, he had an affair
with an undergraduate, divorced Susan, dropped out of school, and took to the racing circuit,
leaving Susan vulnerable to Jack.
Jack was always bold with women but something of a sea coward. We were once out
clamming when an electrical storm came up. He kept shouting statistics about how often
lightning travels down clam rakes. He especially feared the ocean but at one point bought a
twenty-six-foot Pacemaker Sport Fisherman. He loved playing “Cap Jack” and cruising the
Intracoastal Waterway from Topsail to Wrightsville with friends aboard.
When a New York surgeon with a summer place on the island was down, Jack struck a
bargain for a charter to the Gulf Stream. Hamp loves boats next to me, and Jack invited him to
go along. I was given elaborate and detailed instructions by the captain, though, as I later found
out from Hamp, they were wrong. The boat was supposed to be running the shortest route to the
Stream, thus bearing 135° southeast from Topsail Inlet for about sixty-five miles. There they’d
“Not Your Average ‘Good Ole Boy’” 5
meet the edge of the Continental Shelf, where the depth fell off rapidly from 280' to 15,000'. The
“shortest route,” according to Jack, was a 90° bearing from the inlet, which would have made the
distance to the Gulf Stream about eighty-eight miles. If they weren’t back by 8:00 P.M., I was to
call the Coast Guard and report their destination.
About 3:00 that afternoon, I was out with Tom and his wife Ellen looking at a house under
construction on the south end of Topsail. Tom called out that Jack’s boat was passing in the
sound. I couldn’t believe it, but we headed for their dockage to hear the story: no fish and one
minor casualty.
Hamp waited to report until we were in private. Jack had looked for excuses to avoid going
out so far and immediately changed their destination when the radio indicated good fishing off
Frying Pan Shoals. But he hadn’t gone there either. He’d actually run 180° (south), and they’d
never been more than thirty-five miles offshore. Jack’s obtuse angling from Topsail had kept
everybody on board but Hamp from being any wiser. He was up on the bridge with the good
captain and pestered him about an object he sighted in the distance until Jack could no longer
pretend it was a sailboat. It was Buoy RW 40, located thirty-five miles off Wrightsville Beach.
Since they were, for reasons obvious only to “Cap Jack” and Hamp, having no fishing luck,
Jack let Dr. Gardiner take a turn at the wheel. On the way back in, he managed to get them close
enough to shore to take a wave broadside. (He was known for possessing great boats and scant
boating prowess.) One of his friends had given up fishing for drinking and was passed out on a
bunk. At the impact, he hit the deck and messed up his face rather badly. Hamp asked Gardiner
to take a look at him, and the doctor’s response was that the blood had best be mopped up before
it stained the deck. Hamp ended up administering first-aid from Jack’s boat kit.
Like wit, slyness was a salient characteristic. Both came on with a certain level of alcohol,
“Not Your Average ‘Good Ole Boy’” 6
peaked, and reverted to an overbearing nastiness as Jack imbibed more heavily until finally
reaching stupor. After beer as an appetizer, he drank directly from the vodka bottle and chased
with 7-Up or water, starting as soon as he was up in the morning. But he really had to be drunk
enough to put an ordinary man down before he came into his full cunning. Once when he was
asked to leave a Wilmington tavern, he went quietly along. Outside, however, he asked his
companion to wait and slipped back in. While the bartender was occupied, he sneaked behind
the bar, poured beer over all the clean glasses, tiptoed back to the door, yelled to get the man’s
attention, saluted him with the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate Award, and took off.
By dint of his own mother wit, his real mother’s periodic economic rescues, and his use of
women, Jack largely avoided work. After Vietnam, he returned to college and never forgave me
for refusing to send him a paper for an English course. For about nine months, he drew an
impressive salary from a large New York-based corporation—Jack always manufactured his own
references—to pilot a boat to Bermuda and eventually Iran and retrieve its tethered
communications balloons if they were lost. He was told to lease a boat from a Topsail boatbuilder, but repairs, dry rot, inspection failures, etc. finally made the company realize that its
money was being wasted. Meanwhile, Jack lived like a king.
That venture produced the excuse to break off with another female who was “crowding” him.
While he’d attended an obscure Atlanta law school—we never learned why he “quit”—he’d
frequently visited cattle-prod-wielder Pearce and Susan Crutchfield. She was helping his father
support his pursuit of a psychology Ph.D. by using her M.A. in a county mental health clinic.
When they separated, Jack attacked.
We celebrated our return to North Carolina with a New Year’s brunch for friends we’d
grown up there with. Jack was invited, but we didn’t expect him to fly in from Atlanta. He did,
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unexpectedly, with Susan Crutchfield in tow. They called from the Greensboro airport the
morning of New Year’s Eve and came bearing a slab of Callaway Gardens bacon and a copy of
Secrets from Atlanta’s Best Kitchens. In return, we let them stand around and watch us finish
placing the dough leaves on the country ham en crûte. Hamp and I were invited to a party at a
neighbor’s house; and, since Jack and Susan refused to accompany us, we felt obliged to duck
out minutes before the serving of the midnight champagne to get back to our guests and salute
the new year with them. They were already in bed. The next day, we carried him, still drunk, to
the plane; they had already missed three flights, and he didn’t come to until they landed in
Atlanta.
Jack again decided to reform, stop drinking, and go to work. He called to announce that he
was moving to our city because we were “such good influences.” His pronouncement gave me
the hives. He came, finally found a job selling encyclopedias, and undertook the straight life.
Susan made frequent weekend trips to Greensboro; and we saw them often, though, without
drinking, Jack lacked the wit we’d so lauded to our friends. In fact, when sober, he was a dud.
They had many problems, but the great bone of contention was her dog, Angel. He always
traveled with her and hated Jack. When they finally broke up, Jack gave as the reason Susan’s
refusal to leave Angel behind when the two of them went to Bermuda where he was (briefly)
supposed to retrieve more communications balloons. At intervals, Hamp recited for Jack:
Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard
to fetch her poor dog a bone.
But when she bent over, Rover drove her
’cause Rover had a bone of his own.
All the new leaves Jack turned over dried and crumbled quickly. Once when we saw him in
“Not Your Average ‘Good Ole Boy’” 8
Atlanta, he was “lying low” because of “troubles with the IRS.” His mother had financed a
telephone answering service and then a liquor franchise. He’d never paid social security on his
employees or any taxes. People who made allegations against him were simply “allegators.”
Later, he delivered yachts from Atlanta up the coast and freelanced as captain for a lawyer who
liked to get away from his wife at sea with his female companions. He also had another “nice
thing going on the side,” a dope-smuggling operation the FBI grilled Jack about.
We bought a strip of beach property from Jack that his mother, one of the largest property
holders on the island, finally put in his name. He was so pushed for money that he drove to
Greensboro with the deed to pick up his check. It was after closing hours when he arrived, and
he called around until he found a notary at work for an Oldsmobile company. He dragged us out
in the rain to get the deed of trust signed and almost bought a car while he was there. He
wouldn’t even come in when we got back home but shoved on for Atlanta in his rented Buick
Electra. He had to pay off debts quickly “before the Mafia closed in.” The money was gone
immediately. He bought a black, deluxe Oldsmobile F-85 with some kind of jazzed-up sun roof
and claimed he bought a yacht and half-interest in a topless bar in Wilmington.
Jack later told us that, while he was in Atlanta paying off his bills, he’d killed a cop. He was
pulled on suspicion of drunk driving. The arresting officer slammed him against the car and,
after he’d made Jack spread, kicked his ankles and knocked him to the ground. Jack tried to
deck him as he came back up but instead sent him flying over the top of the car. Between 11:30
P.M. and 3:00 A.M., the cop died. Jack, still in jail, was charged with manslaughter. He got off,
he said, because his lawyer proved that the officer had been in another physical exchange after
he’d jailed Jack.
When his money ran out, Jack moved to Wilmington, rented an apartment, and set himself up
“Not Your Average ‘Good Ole Boy’” 9
as a “marine surveyor.” He never had a client, but we used to call occasionally to hear his
recorded message: “Welcome aboard. The crew is out of the office just now. Please leave a
message.” Hamp and Tom planned, and Tom later executed, a treat for our businessman. Tom
used his own recorder to tape a message at 33/4 inches per second. Then he called Jack’s number
and, when he was bleeped to begin, played it at 71/2 inches per second. About three days later,
Jack called Tom to get him to commiserate over losing an important client because “the
goddamned telephone message center screwed up.”
Another project, again financed by his mother, Eula, was a “raw bar” [?] on Topsail. We
thought he’d found his niche. He gathered exotic recipes, including mine for bouillabaisse. His
current girlfriend, about nineteen, did his menus, was chief waitress, and ran the place when he
was “lying low” from the owner because he hadn’t paid the rent. With his usual cleverness, Jack
offered as his specialty a mixture of seafoods, the “Seaduction,” a name he’d already concocted
for one of Eula’s rental cottages. Unfortunately, the cook was intimate with only fried oysters,
shrimp, fish, and clams and Manhattan clam chowder, and the slaw was krauty. The third time a
woman demanded mayonnaise for it, Jack slammed out of the kitchen and jammed a jar and a
large spoon down in front of her. She and her husband slammed out, without paying. The first
time we ate there, Hamp ordered oyster fritters from the menu after Jack had told him his first
three choices were “unfortunately unavailable due to circumstances beyond the restaurant’s
control.” The cook quit on the spot, and Jack had to prepare them.
The “restaurant” lasted two weeks, and this time the results were more disastrous. Jack put
all his furniture and possessions, except his car, up for sale, including the paintings Hamp had
done in graduate school and let Jack use to decorate his apartment and restaurant. Eula had
become miffed and sent back his long-sought beer license, which he couldn’t apply for in his
“Not Your Average ‘Good Ole Boy’” 10
own name because he’d been convicted of a felony. Drunk, he faced her and, she claimed,
struck her. She swore out a warrant to have him committed. Finally, after seeing three doctors,
he was declared competent. Eula sued his lawyer and the doctors.
His father died when Jack was a baby, and he was sent to “military school” as soon as
possible. He was dismissed from it with the same celerity. Because of the precariousness of his
relationship with “Eula,” as he called her, the Buds’ parties were never at his house. A tiny,
humped-over, retired teacher, she was the most picturesque (and richest) person on the island.
But she made her “beer money” digging clams for local restaurants. She was out in her skiff at
low tide every day of clement weather and was infamous for her conch chowder and clam pie.
Where do you go when you can get along with all women but the one you’re dependent on, your
mother? Were Eula and Jack destined ever to find happiness together?
Eula, unbeknownst to her, entertained the beach crowd once. On a Fourth of July, practically
everybody from the old group and tangential to it happened to gravitate to the island. She was in
Florida, and a drunken crony, also unbeknownst to her, had moved in with Jack for the duration.
And, no, no one ever whispered that he might be “gay.” Jack passed the word that everyone was
to gather at Eula’s that evening.
Many of the Buds relished paying Jack back for the
destructiveness he had brought to their cottages. Dudley’s wife Ellen ravished one of Eula’s
special varieties of airplane plant. (I didn’t refuse the shoot she offered me.) The party, beyond
pillage, was spillage and general ravage. Even Hamp accidentally overturned a plant stand.
After the restaurant failed, Jack manufactured more letters of reference to get a job delivering
yachts. Then he dropped out of sight. Tom called to tell us that our old buddy had gone to
Virginia and taken a job as a pipe-fitter. I figured this was preliminary to heading for the oil
fields of Alaska, but that was a pipe dream. He lost his position after three days. I don’t know
“Not Your Average ‘Good Ole Boy’” 11
why; he was totally unqualified.
Jack died of cirrhosis of the liver at thirty-four. He must have hated being so predictable.
He’s still the stuff of Topsail Beach legends.
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