Sunday, October 23, 2016

William F. Buckley Jr. Comes to Flint by Stephen Rodrick



In honor of William F. Buckley Jr., journalist and Flint Powers graduate Stephen Rodrick looks back at our encounter with the man who, according to The New York Times, "marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse." And endeared himself to many people, including me, who disagreed with his politics.


Take it away, Steve...

In another time, guys hung the heads of dead mammals on their walls. Apparently, they thought this impressed the ladies. But as time passed, proving that you were a hunter lost its aphrodisiac powers with the gatherers. Nowadays, sensitive men have replaced Bambi’s mom with Godard posters, Picasso lithographs, and/or vintage, preferably pre-1979 Debbie Harry shots at CBGB’s.

On my mantel is the key to the City of Flint given to me by William F. Buckley Jr.

This might explain why I am chronically single. It was the spring of 1984, my senior year at Powers Catholic. I had already made a series of fundamental errors: There was the year playing freshman football under the Darwinian Dan Duncan who would have been right at home at Gallipoli. Then there was the time I volunteered to run up to 7-11 and buy Mr. Winchester some smokes only to get my brand new yellow Lands End shirt covered in grass stains and blood after getting picked off like a gimpy antelope by three kids from Flint Northwestern.

Still, my favorite mistake was passing on a chance to see a triple bill of f time for, uh, Spandau Ballet at the Royal Oak Music Theatre. The show was quite entertaining with lots of foppish hair and frilly shirts. I completely disregarded the fact that a middle-aged balding man playing synthesizers provided most of the band’s sound. I forgave a lot because I’d become an Anglophile, which in early 80s Flint made me a jackass.

I blame it on my friends Gordon and Jim. Despite the fact that they both grew up on the not always happy-making streets of Flint, the two of them had developed an obsession with the United Kingdom. Gordie even looked like Sebastian Flyte as played by Anthony Andrews in the BBC production of Brideshead Revisited. Well, except he wasn’t gay — dude was a playa! — and it’s doubtful Sebastian ever placed his face against a yellow legal pad and said, "Man, look how greasy my face is!" Jim’s take was more rock 'n’ roll, perhaps most tragically summed up by his insistence on wearing a Clash T-shirt from their Cut The Crap tour, which was actually just crap.

Somehow the American version of Anglo mutated into preppiness. We all sort of wished we went to a prep school. They just seemed cooler. I remember Jim and I almost picking up two Carman girls at an Our Lady of Lebanon dance by saying we were lacrosse players from Cranbrook. (This was slightly less entertaining than the OLOL Dance held on the night of the Larry Holmes-Gerry Cooney fight, where I drank an entire bottle of Mad Dog and then proceeded to tell everyone that I was, in fact, Gerry Cooney. Ah, so many memories.)

No human being better personified the American-as-Englishman than William F. Buckley Jr., Firing Line host, spy novelist, and former New York City mayoral candidate. He spoke in a clipped, hesitating manner accentuated by excellent arching eyebrows. In the spring of 1984, the Flint glitterati laid off some more Buick City workers, pooled the savings, and announced that Buckley was speaking at the Whiting Auditorium and then attending a cocktail party at the University of Michigan-Flint (or maybe it was Mott Community College.)

Luckily, we had a friend named Jon Kells who had a really hot sister, but more importantly in this context, a dad who taught at Michigan-Flint. We scored tickets to the speech and reception, but that wasn’t enough. We gamed the extremely limited flights arriving at Bishop from New York City and cut our afternoon classes to meet Buckley at the airport. Some guys blew off class to get blow jobs or smoke pot, we cut out of Mr. K’s choir torture so we could accost a middle-aged man at the airport.

It seemed right at the time. The best thing was this was celeb-free Flint and three camera crews showed up at the airport! WFB, as his friends called him, made some brief remarks, none of which, I swear, touched on his 1960s support for segregation. After a few minutes, he was rushed away, declining our offer of a ride. We barely touched the hem of his Brook Brothers suit.

I don’t remember much from his Whiting speech. He used a lot of words I never heard of and there were some empty seats; I mean it wasn’t The Nutcracker, what do you expect? The reception was held in some prof’s drafty, vaguely gothic house that probably could be bought for $127,000 back then and could probably be bought for $126,000 now. It was a momentous night for me: my first cocktail party. Now two decades later I know every cocktail party is exactly the same—intolerable made bearable by creeping drunkenness and the idea you’ve been there long enough to split without pissing off the hosts who you probably don’t even like, and hell, the alternative was staying home at watching Homicide: Life On the Street on DVD—but at the time it seemed like something, well, out of an Evelyn Waugh novel. Buckley was pounding vodka and grapefruit and had a frozen look on his ruddy face that I now realize was half public persona, half get me the fuck out of here. Waves of assistant professors shook his hand and asked him what he really thought about Gore Vidal, who I didn’t know. Well, I don’t know him now, but I at least know of him.

I don’t know if it was the early spring weather or middle-aged smart folks starved for a little intellectual glitter, but all the grown-ups got stinking drunk, like stinking straight-night at the Copa drunk. After an hour or so, Buckley had enough. His blue eyes began searching for his designated driver. Alas, he found him, but the hapless or happy prof was wasted beyond even the lax Michigan DUI standards of the mid-80s.

He then turned to us, and stage-whispered, "Say, are you boys still good for that ride (pronounced rhiiide)?" We nodded yes. Then Buckley grabbed his Mackintosh and muttered, "Let’s get out of here, then." He said goodbye to no one, which seemed quite British and awesome.

We went out to my car. Buckley blanched for just a moment when he noticed it was a two-tone Chevy Chevette. He piled into the passenger seat and placed his black loafers down on a sea of Taco Bell wrappers and a boom box holding the first Smiths cassette. I lurched the car into drive. Someone asked a complicated question about Reagan and Thatcherism that Buckley answered with a bon mot so heavily accented in alcohol and an American accent not known to common men that I floored the Chevette through a blood red light on Saginaw Street. Buckley didn’t lose his cool, offering just a cautionary stuttering of, "Ah, ah, ah," as he pointed his patrician forefinger toward the next potentially lethal intersection.

It’s a moment I thought of recently after the death of the writer David Halberstam who perished after a Cal Berkeley journalism student ferrying him to an interview with Y.A. Tittle turned left on red with tragic results. Maybe it was luck, maybe it was Buckley’s Yale-educated and old school Catholic God waving off the traffic, but we didn’t get broadsided by a Chevy Blazer.

Buckley was staying at the recently opened and soon to be shuttered Hyatt Regency. As we pulled into the circular drive, I screeched the Chevette to a stop and shut down my V-4. "Now, now, that was an adventure," said Buckley with a smile. I asked him if he could sign something as a memento for me. "I, I think I can do better than that." He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small, blue velvety case. His manicured finger popped the case open. Inside was a gold key. The inscription read, “From the Citizens of Flint, Michigan.” Buckley pulled out a fountain pens and signed, "To Stephen, Best Wishes, William F. Buckley." He gathered his trench coat and disappeared into the revolving doors.

Within a few years of the encounter, I stopped buying Buckley’s novels and sailing books and became, quite frankly, ashamed at my earlier conservative leaning, over-compensating with votes for Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader. (I still am a bit of an Anglophiliac, I’m listening to "The Kinks Are The Village Preservation Society" as I write this.) For years, the Buckley note remained buried in a drawer, a reminder of a not so happy time in my life. I took it out a few years ago, and thought about it in a different way: here was a famous man who, when confronted with three slightly insane teenage fans with varying hygiene and acne issues, treated us with grace. I work as a journalist in New York now and sometimes cover politics. I thought I might run into Buckley at some similarly lame cocktail party. It never happened. Perhaps it was just as well. Not even Evelyn Waugh could write a better second act.


16 comments:

  1. this is an amazing story. how was this left out of the classes i had with you?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hilarious. This is without a doubt the best Flint related website I've found. Humorous, graceful, smart, and nary a hint o' cynicism OR irrational optimism.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm from Portland, but this blog is managing to make Flint look very appealing. I might just buy 15 houses and move there.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Dear Anonymous from Portland,

    I politely suggest you pay a visit to the 7/11 on Carpenter Road that Steve references in his story before you start buying real estate in Flint. (Assuming the 7/11 still exists.) If you survive and find that you enjoyed the experience, then you and Flint just might be meant for each other.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The building that formerly housed the 7-11 store still exists, but now under different ownership.
    The author from Portland would be welcomed with open arms to many real estate agents in the Flint area. There are many great property investments in the city, namely in the aforementioned vicinity of Carpenter and Dupont Streets, not to mention within walking distance of not one, but two high schools.
    It's prime land indeed. Now "surviving" or "enjoying" the experience, that's hard to determine. It's all in how you would like to approach the subject, whether in a physical or mental fashion. Best advice would be to travel there, investigate the general neighborhood, interview its residents. Your mind would be made up very quickly.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Now this is THE story Hollywood should tell about Flint. Will Ferrell would look great in a two tone Chevy Chevette! Someone needs to secure the rights to the screenplay! Seriously, this is a GREAT story - BRAVO!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Steve,
    I enjoyed your story. Must be great having that momento.
    This is Matt Blankenship. I sat in front of you in Senior English class. Hell, i can't remember the name, now. Contemporary English....andvanced composition? well, that was our only class together...Kinda funny, i was more liberal in my politics then, and more conservitive now. I'm actually a fan of Voodoo economics. Your right wing rhetoric, back then, must be why you got along so charminly with David Rose.

    It must be great having that momento ant the great story to go along with it. I can't say I have any like that.

    I was working at UM-Flint one night when an old black female poet was reading her work at the Kiva. I can't remember her name now, but I knew of her then and had read her work. I must be those years of Labatt's Blue, pinball, and free corn at The Torch that stole that name from me.

    Well, I stood in the back of the Kiva and listened. It seemed to be quite packed(maybe not as much as when they showed The Wall or Heavy Metal). The reading ended after closing. I let the people out. The english department or whoever the hell invited this lady hauled ass outa there, leaving this lady poet waiting alone in the lobby. I'm not an elite or artsy person, but I believe if you invite someone to your place, you at least stay with them till they leave. This lady was in her 70's, at least. But this did happen in Flint, so go figure. and it did offer me the chance to talk with her a while. I wish i had some tidbit of wisdom she offered to cap my story off, but i can only remember asking her if she had met Lawerence Farlinghetti, as i was a big fan of his poems. She said she had not had the chance, but would like to meet him.

    After a bit of websurfing, i think i found my mystery poet: Gwendolyn Brooks. maybe it was her, maybe it wasn't.

    Well, thats my story.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Great story; great website!
    By the way, when he taught history at Powers, Denny Winchester smoked Lark cigarettes...

    ReplyDelete
  9. I believe the members of Spandau Ballet also smoked Larks.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Thanks to your experience (which was like many other students), by my sophmore year - 1985- the 7-11 was off limits.

    That was followed by a huge decline in Powers students reporting ass beatings by local thugs.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Way to go, Rodrick. Because of you no one at Powers could get a Slurpee.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Now, it's been many a long year since the Day, but I distinctly remember seeing =both= Spandau Ballet at Royal Oak and the Clash with the Who... the Clash got booed off the stage, dammit. And I didn't believe my friend that her passes would get us backstage, and I waited, dismissive, in the lobby while the rest of the group got to meet the Kemp brothers.

    ReplyDelete
  13. hee hee, they had the bluest eyes ... Devo wasn't there when we saw the Clash/Who combo, though. Pete Townshend was really pissed off at the audience.

    ReplyDelete
  14. That is a brilliant screenplay in the making. :) So fun to read, I almost feel I was there sitting on taco bell wrappers... I do wish it were a movie.

    As a fellow Royal Oak/Spandau Ballet patron as well, I feel your pain.

    I also managed to see Depeche Mode, and that's when I realized I could play their music with one synthesizer, not the four like they were using.

    My best concert experience would have to be 4th row at a Talking Heads tour. When I saw those tickets for sale, and realized I didn't have enough cash, I walked through the GV mall assuming I'd find someone I knew who I could borrow money from. I did, it was someone from high school who I didn't know very well, but she loaned me the cash, and it was well worth the begging. :)... and yes, I paid her back.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Great tale. Reminds me of when ABC correspondent and later UN Ambassador John Scali came to Mott CC to give a talk back in 1968 and I drove him around town.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.