P.J.: A Memoir
Chapter One
“A good family…is one that used to be better.”
- Cleveland Amory
Heat.
August heat.
South Florida August heat.
You’ve never been hot until you’ve spent a summer in the dusty back streets of Manatee, Florida. June is miserable. July is unbearable. August challenges the writer to describe it.
Just an hour after sunrise, the sky changes from a clear blue to a blazing white-hot. The humidity ranges upward from ninety percent and the barometric pressure hangs in the low twenty-nines.
Dogs would howl if they could stop panting long enough. Eggs would emerge hard-boiled if hens had the strength to lay them. People would go insane if they were not so depressed. P. J. Dowd would have crawled into the refrigerator had there been room.
Young P. J. (Phileas Jimson, if you must know) was trying to summon up enough energy to be bored. Boredom is a constant threat for a nine-going-on-ten-year-old after two-and-a-half months of summer vacation. A superhuman effort was necessary for P. J. to haul his sweating carcass into the sanctuary of his treehouse.
This surreal piece of architecture sprawled across half a dozen twisted branches of a huge live oak that leaned precariously over the edge of the Manatee River. It had leaned precariously over the brackish river for eight hundred years, give or take a dozen. Through countless hurricanes and shallow floods, the venerable oak had clung to the eroding bank until it sat at the tip of a narrow peninsula consisting mostly of gnarled roots. The Seminole chief Billy Bowlegs had savored its shade as had the nosy Spaniard Hernando DeSoto.
P. J. Dowd had never heard of Billy Bowlegs and thought DeSoto was a flashy automobile. Nonetheless, he was susceptible to the aura of timelessness surrounding the old tree. In his treehouse, P. J. didn’t have to be what his mother or father or grandmother or aunts wanted him to be. In his treehouse, he could be P. J. Dowd, king of the cowboys, spaceship captain, slayer of dragons and scourge of the seven seas.
Building the treehouse had occupied the first half of the summer. Between scrounging scraps of wood and learning how to drive nails into the rocklike oak, the project had been the first to occupy his attention for more than a week. His perseverance had resulted in a haven wherein his imagination could be unleashed to the accompaniment of the lazily lapping river twenty feet below.
“Phil-ee-AHHSS!”
The cry was enough to shatter P. J.’s most treasured fantasies. Nothing could demolish a pleasant afternoon reverie like his mother’s summons. The first two syllables were delivered in a stentorian mezzo-soprano. The last syllable soared into the ozone at a piercing frequency that elicited howls of ecstasy from every dog in a ten-block radius. Having a name like Phileas was bad enough. Having it broadcast to the world was like being slapped on a sunburned back.
Like many of his contemporaries from the Deep South, P. J. was named for a pair of maternal ancestors long since gone to dust. Nary a thought was wasted on what it was like for a kid to go through life with such stilted monikers. In the Deep South, the past was much more important than the present, or, God Forbid, the future. The house from which P. J.’s call to order emanated bore eloquent witness to that fact.
Once the hub of the largest sugar cane plantation in the state, the house stood in decaying splendor on the last two acres still owned by the descendents of Taylor McIntosh Jimson. In the days when Senator Jimson was establishing himself as a role model for generations of Southern politicians, the house sparkled like a set from Gone With The Wind. By the late nineteen fifties, it looked more like a set from Frankenstein In Florida.
The once-glistening Georgia marble had gone green with mold and the long-unpainted wood was as gray as the Spanish moss that festooned the surrounding oaks. The once-immaculate gardens had succumbed to the semi-tropical tendency of living things to become jungle. Where once the cream of Southern nobility swirled in intricate social posturings, P. J., his parents, his maternal grandmother, and a pair of mildewed maiden aunts half-heartedly strove to keep up appearances.
Sarah Effie, P. J.’s mother, had already achieved her major goal in life: insuring that the Jimson name didn’t die when she did. The living, breathing result of her ambition was less than grateful for her dedication. Sarah Effie taught a version of history at Manatee High School. This version ended with the Civil War, a moral victory for the South.
During the recent unpleasantness sometimes known as World War Two, Sarah Effie had upheld the grand traditions of Southern Womanhood by rolling bandages for the Red Cross. This led her into an occasional trip to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Tampa where she allegedly helped boost the morale of the wounded warriors. It was there that she met a lanky Master Sergeant from the remotest reaches of the Arkansas Ozarks. An unlikely match, to be sure, but Sarah Effie had just passed her 35th birthday and her options were rapidly dwindling.
Benjamin Bumgarner Dowd was the scion of a hillbilly clan known primarily for incest and feeblemindedness. Benny Dowd moved to the beat of a different drummer; a very relaxed drummer. Charitably described by a friend as “slower’n molasses runnin’ uphill in January,” Benny found fulfillment in the Army Quartermaster Corps. While serving near the front lines in Boca Raton, he had been severely battered when a towering stack of entrenching tools had collapsed on him. The accident crushed his nearly non-existent ambition.
Retired on full disability, Benny served as an unpaid deputy to Sheriff Big Roy Clayton. The only time he actually put on a badge was when he accompanied Big Roy on one of the well-publicized raids on the Manatee County moonshiners. The raids served a dual purpose. They kept the local distillers honest and they kept Big Roy’s office supplied with the choicest vintage of local swampwater.
Slouched against a dingy courthouse pillar, cowboy hat pulled low over bloodshot eyes, Benny was as much a fixture around the sheriff’s office as the filthy spittoons. Always within his reach was a Mason jar full of high-test with a slice of lemon floating on top. What strangers often diagnosed as catatonia was merely Benny’s method of dealing with the rigors of living in a haunted house full of aging Southern Belles.
Grandma Jimson’s maiden name was O’Bannion. Red of hair, green of eye, and fiery of temperament, Molly Kathleen was a liberated woman. She had gone to the Sorbonne on a full scholarship in an era when women rarely graduated from high school. She also enslaved the entire male population of the Left Bank, one of whom was a spoiled brat by the name of T. McIntosh Jimson, Jr. The Senator’s only son was referred to in disgust by the rest of the family as “Junior.”
Why was a brilliant and beautiful woman like Molly O’Bannion attracted to a seeker of depravity like Junior Jimson? Perhaps it was the prospect of great wealth or the lure of a great and aristocratic Southern Name. More likely, it was because Junior could charm the habit off a nun.
Junior’s charm camouflaged a multitude of character defects that Molly discovered only after they were married. He managed to squander most of the family fortune before drinking himself into an early grave. Molly, meanwhile, hosted the grandest literary salon in the South and tried to keep the Jimson estates presentable in the face of dwindling cash reserves. After Junior passed on, Molly was reduced to teaching school and selling off the Jimson holdings bit-by-bit in order to keep body and soul together.
By the time her grandson came along, Molly was hobbled by arthritis and her eyesight was failing, but her mind and tongue were as sharp as ever. She was contemptuous of modern education and drilled young P. J. mercilessly in geography, history and spelling. P. J. had spelled his way through McGuffey’s Blue Book by the time he was five and could name all the states, their capitals, and the rivers on which the capitals were situated. Molly knew the power of positive reinforcement and rewarded P. J.’s efforts with huge batches of Toll House cookies. Her only other joy in life lay in offending the sensibilities of her two sisters-in-law.
It was not difficult to offend Elizabeth McIntosh Jimson and Judith McIntosh Jimson. The sisters were born two years apart and suffered from a birth defect common to the Southern aristocracy. Their heads were canted backwards on their necks requiring them to look down their noses at practically everything. Nearly six feet tall, the two were politely referred to as “statuesque.” By the time they had attained their majority, they were as forbidding a pair of dowagers as has ever blighted the Florida landscape.
Judith and Elizabeth preferred to pretend that their playboy brother didn’t exist. Junior did his part by breathing bourbon in their faces and swatting them on their oversized fannies. Neither had ever married and, like most maiden aunts, had firm beliefs about child-rearing which they tried to inflict on P. J.
With this family history in mind, P. J. made little haste in responding to his mother’s call.
9:02:48 PM 
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