“Bro. You wanna hear some good music? There’s this band, it’s called Polka Your Eye Out…” The hawk-faced man at the bar to my left compulsively flipped coasters, his beard segmented with elastics in the nu-metal fashion. He wasn’t really talking to me but over me to Charlie, whose deep Old Testament voice sometimes invites this latent male flirtation. We were having beers and corned beef sandwiches at the Ohio Club, the oldest bar in Arkansas, where Al Capone and Lucky Luciano once gambled behind its Prohibition front as a cigar store. We’d arrived in Hot Springs an hour before, a seven-hour drive in my little white Lexus I bought from a dead woman for 450 dollars. The beer tasted historical and the sandwiches were okay, accompanied by salads of iceberg lettuce and cheese.
The hawk-faced man was some sort of Hot Springs bar star who the sullen bartenders of the Ohio Club evidently couldn’t wait to be rid of. “Listen, you want to know where the locals go, okay, there’s Maxine’s,” he rambled, starved for attention, fingering his flute-shaped beard. “3-B’s, that’s the industry bar. And then there’s Boogies — but you don’t want to go to Boogies.” (“If you wanna catch an STD or merely a fist to the face for looking at someone the wrong way, then this place is for you,” reads one review of Boogies. “We rock at partying hard!” says their website. They’re open til five.) “The other night I saw a car flipped upside down outside there, right in the parking spot. Perfectly inside the lines, bro, except the wheels were facing up,” the man cackled. “Whoever did that probably just walked in like nothing happened.”
On the second floor, a jazz band — two enormous saxophone players, a shaky keyboardist of maybe eighty years, drummer, upright bassist, and an old woman in red flannel, singing the standards of Hoagy Carmichael and such. Perhaps an obsession with sax runs deep in Hot Springs (the town’s most famous native being, naturally, Bill Clinton). But neither obese saxophonist was much good on his own, never mind together; one thinks of the directive David Lynch once gave his own freaky jazz band: “Imagine you’re a chicken with your head cut off running around with 1,000 bennies shoved down your throat,” only maybe replace benzedrine with meth. The band skronked out a rendition of “Stardust” as I examined, above the men’s room toilet, a print of Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton, and Michelle Obama joining the famous dogs for poker and cigars. It was around this time I started getting the idea that Hot Springs, Arkansas was a very mysterious place.
The Natives used to call Hot Springs “the Valley of the Vapors.” Not to be all junior park ranger (which I am), but can you imagine — it’s 10,000 years ago, just before sunrise — you approach what’s now the Ouachita Mountains to find them clouded with hot mist, steaming water falling over blue-green algae into 147-degree pools. (The water bubbling up from the area’s forty-seven thermal springs today fell to earth as rain 4,000 years before. I learned this earning my junior ranger badge.) The springs were a sanctuary where warring tribes — Choctaw, Quapaw, Cherokee, Caddo — could enjoy its restorative properties in peace, and legend has it that upon his 1541 arrival, the conquistador Hernando DeSoto amicably joined them. (“So came we to a valley that lay between great green hills. And there was water of exceeding hotness, so that we were afrighted, bethinking ourselves of death and the nearness of the fires of Hell,” says one supposed account of the expedition. “Anon there came dark red men and their women down the valley, and trod the strange grey rocks without fear, and bathed in the waters, laughing and making great joy. Then we were no longer afraid, but knew it was a warm Well of Life.”) That story was good for tourism and almost certainly untrue; had DeSoto’s expedition passed through Hot Springs, of which there is no archaeological evidence, friendly bath-time probably wasn’t the vibe.
Four hundred or so years later, it was another kind of sanctuary. Hot Springs was a gambling town on the low, but when Leo McLaughlin was elected mayor in 1925, he made good on his promise to run it “wide-open” — though gambling remained illegal in Arkansas, the local law let it slide, and soon Hot Springs was home to world-class casinos, hotels and nightclubs alongside the thermal spas of Bathhouse Row (which look rather like fancy loony bins, you’ll find, if you take the historical tour). Offering a full spectrum of indulgence — therapeutic baths on one hand, free-reigning hedonism on the other — Hot Springs drew millions of visitors a year to a Bible Belt town of 28,000, and among them were mobsters on the lam or otherwise, who may have been thugs in New York or Chicago but down here were total gentlemen. There was a nationwide man-hunt for Lucky Luciano when the FBI caught him in 1936, strolling down Hot Springs’ main promenade with the local PD’s chief detective.
For a while there, Hot Springs appeared set to become what Las Vegas would eventually — the beneficiary of massive investments in the gambling and resort industries. In Hot Springs’ 1940s prime, Vegas was known as a dingy desert town controlled by criminals; with gambling illegal in America everywhere but Nevada, anyone who could feasibly run it or fund it was no doubt in some way mob-tied. But in Hot Springs, there was “no hoodlum element, no oppression, no scum,” so said a local politician in 1962. “There is no guy around here with greasy hair and a Mafia smile. This place reflects the quality, character and charm of all of us. This place has got roots. It’s 24 hours of happiness.”
What ended Hot Springs’ fifty-year run as America’s secret capitol of indulgence was a moral panic led by church groups and out-of-towners, who shut down the county’s illegal gambling operation in 1966 (just as Las Vegas was cleaning up its act, diluting organized crime with corporate investment). The local economy never recovered; a push to re-brand Hot Springs as family-friendly in the ‘70s didn’t take. The town’s ritziest club, The Vapors, was converted to a disco, then a honky-tonk, then finally a church, and the Art Deco hotels were turned into nursing homes or left to rot. I stayed at The Arlington, still the largest hotel in Arkansas — a gem of thermal baths and elegant ballrooms, where prime rib is served on Saturdays and Al Capone’s old suite remains intact. Down the block three more hotels, once full of beautiful people and now empty, plus a CBD store, a jerky store, and a wax museum.
“A case of the vapors” — I love this turn of phrase. Dizziness, bitchiness, melancholy, mania — in terms of good old-fashioned female hysteria, the vapors have really got it all. For thousands of years til Freud came along, female hysteria was, in fact, the only kind (hystéra being the Greek word for uterus, the uterus being the source of the condition, that is, if we’re going with Hippocrates). They might chalk up an affection vaporeuse to imbalanced humors, demonic possession, sordid city life, or unfulfilled desire, and then treat it with herbs, or fire, or water, or sex, or abstinence, or exorcisme. Victorian ladies kept smelling salts in their little satin purses, so inclined were they to swoon at any moment. As for me, I’ve caught the vapors plenty. In school I was famous for fainting in church with some regularity, something about the frankincense air and the stand-up-sit-down — social suicide then, but rather glamorous now…
Maybe I caught a case again, approaching hour three of the drive’s seven, but that’s between me and my man. I was good, anyway, by the time we reached The Arlington, where the lobby is painted like the first art I ever loved (the Henri Rousseau with the monkeys in the jungle) and the room keys are actual keys. That night after the Ohio Club, we walked through downtown Hot Springs, where everything seemed to close at either two p.m. or nine — past the stately bathhouses of Central Ave (themselves, and the ancient springs behind them, America’s oldest and second-smallest national park), away from the mountains and towards the Waffle House and the part of town where people actually live. We passed what was left of a dinner theater, the remains of an old-timey pharmacy (“DRUGS”), and a German restaurant after close, tired men in dreadlocks and lederhosen counting cash. A 1940s theater, beneath which may exist a portal to hell, was now home to the “twenty-sixth season” of performances by the magician Maxwell Blade. And Hot Springs’ premiere B.Y.O.B. adult cabaret, “the Best Hole in the Wall Club of its Kind in the World,” where a neon screen flashed to us that not only was every night Amateur Night, but tonight (being Thursday) was also Hula Hoop Night. “Would you get a new beat already?” I asked myself, declaring everything we passed to be “Lynchian” and, just then, glimpsed down an alley, through an iron gate, at a giant Bob’s Big Boy mascot, grinning ominously from atop a lone pergola.
The next day I woke before sunrise to feed the meter and found that the sidewalk was steaming. I crossed the street to the base of the mountains, where a cascade of spring water spilled down the slope and into a pool too hot to touch for more than a few seconds. I followed a path through the yellowing oaks as far as I could go.
I’d be remiss not to note that a good deal of what I know of Hot Springs I learned from David Hill, who has a book about its history, by way of his own family’s, called The Vapors. He also has a Substack where he writes about his hometown, and that’s where I first read Frank Stanford — specifically “The Snake Doctors,” which just may be the best poem I know. “The Snake Doctors,” published in 1971, tells a long, crazy story about a young boy in Arkansas who seeks chaotic vengeance after watching some outlaws castrate and butcher his pig. The poem starts like this…
I was in the outhouse
I heard somebody at the pump
I looked out the chink hole
It was the two fishermen
They stole fish
…and ends with a line that makes my entire body tremble…
Oh Sweet Jesus the levees that break in my heart
“Does America have a national epic?” asked a tweet I saw over the weekend, citing other countries’ examples (Iliad, Aeneid, Mahabharata, and so forth). The answer is yes, and furthermore, it’s a 15,283-line punctuationless poem, a manic mystic’s rambling Southern gothic — The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You, by Frank Stanford. They say Stanford began his epic in high school and published it at twenty-eight — a cracked Delta dreamscape populated by angels and widows and horse thieves and chain gangs, Freedom Riders and swamp freaks, blind astronomers, deaf castratos, Jesus Christ and his apostles, Hank Williams, Sonny Liston, guys with names like Tangle Eye and Born-in-the-Camp-With-Six-Toes, and the narrator, a dreamy young anarchist named Francis Gildart. And Death, in any number of his guises — Death as a hipster in cool sunglasses, Death as a Cadillac outside your door.
“The swamp-rat Rimbaud,” a poet once called him, but that wasn’t what Frank Stanford was. Or, not at first. His father had been a wealthy engineer, his mother a descendant of Mississippi aristocracy; black Cadillacs would chauffeur him to school. Except in the summers when his father, who built levees along the Mississippi, would move his family to the Delta, where they lived in tented camps with laborers, mostly Black. (That’s where he met Tangle Eye and Born-in-the-Camp-With-Six-Toes.) Stanford went to boarding school in the Ouachita mountains, was admitted to a graduate poetry seminar as a teenage undergrad before dropping out in ‘69, and besides a short-lived attempt as a New Yorker, spent the rest of his life in Arkansas. It wasn’t til he was twenty that he learned he’d been adopted, born Francis Gildart Smith in a Mississippi orphanage for children of unwed mothers. An identity crisis followed, or a shining opportunity. In any case, he leapt into the void.
Between ‘71 and ‘78 Stanford published seven books of poems, the 542-page Battlefield among them (“a defense of ‘the ribald the sublime and the reckless’ from the creeping forces of sameness that define America as much as any bright vision of freedom,” one writer once said of Stanford’s epic). He married during that time, quickly divorced, worked a job in the woods as a land surveyor, drank in juke joints, denounced the literary world, city life, and segregation, and at one point spent a month in a mental institution, claiming afterwards that it’d been fun. He also made up stories, sometimes willing them into truth. And he partied intensely. Allen Ginsberg, a fan of Stanford’s, dropped by one of his soirées, during which the host fired a shotgun through his ceiling to weed out the real ones from the posers. Everyone in Fayetteville, Arkansas in the seventies thought Stanford was either a genius or a lunatic. Otherwise, they were in love with him.
I should also mention that Frank Stanford looked like this.
“To know Frank then,” said the writer Ellen Gilchrist, “was to see how Jesus got his followers.” He’d been seeing her in the mid-seventies; he’d been seeing plenty of women in the mid-seventies. He’d gotten married again, to the painter Ginny Crouch, and meanwhile he’d rented a house with the poet C.D. Wright (who once said he was “beautiful as the sun,” and the greatest liar she’d ever known). There were others, too — potters, sculptors, singers. One of them was Lucinda Williams.
Williams was twenty-four when she met Frank Stanford in the spring of ‘78, a fellow University of Arkansas dropout (in fact, her father, the poet Miller Williams, had been one of Stanford’s professors there). After a few years bumming around the Southern folk scene, she had to her name a notebook of songs, a guitar, a voice she’d nearly destroyed singing in bars, and a brutal infatuation with Stanford. There’s a great New Yorker profile of Williams, published in 2000, which begins on a damp night in the heart of the Delta, looking for a juke joint like the one on the cover of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. (I really can’t express enough how I came to my “profession” at the wrong time.) The author, Bill Buford, called Williams’ songs unforgiving —
“…Unforgiving because they are so relentlessly about pain or longing or can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head sexual desire, but most often they’re about loss, and usually about losing some impossible fuck-up of a man, who has got more charm and charisma than a civilized society should allow, and who never lives up to any of the promises he made when he was drunk, on drugs, in lust, in love, incarcerated, in pain, insane, in rehab, or, in some other essential but frustratingly appealing romantic way, unaccountable. He’s usually from Baton Rouge, Louisiana (and a bass player), or from Lafayette, Louisiana (and a bass player), or from Lake Charles, Louisiana (and a bass player), or maybe from Greenville, Mississippi (and a bass player), and the songs come across as both very Southern and also painfully autobiographical. Ouch! you think after you’ve heard Lucinda Williams for the first time, this girl has gone through some shit.”
It was June of ‘78, one month before his thirtieth birthday, and Stanford had returned from two weeks in New Orleans to Fayetteville, stopping to send flowers to Lucinda. While he’d been gone, Crouch (his wife) and Wright (his lover) had met to unravel his lies, and look, there they both were to greet him. Stanford told the women he needed to stop by his office, so they drove him there, and then home. He went to his room, shut the door, unbuttoned his shirt, lay down in bed, and shot himself three times in the chest with a .22-caliber target pistol. (“That deadly duet,” his wife recalled, of the gun and the moan: “Pop. Oh! Pop. Oh! Pop. Oh!”)
For whatever reason, it was Miller Williams, Lucinda’s father, who got the call. There was blood all over the bed and on the telephone. When he returned home, Lucinda had put the flowers in a vase. She hadn’t heard the news. Later she’d write a song about that day (and the funeral Stanford hadn’t wanted, attended by his mother and sister and dozens of girls they’d never met) called “Pineola.” Where he is buried, in a small Ouachita mountain town beneath tall pines, “Frank Stanford, Poet” is etched into the footstone, and beneath it: “It wasn’t a dream, it was a flood.”
I want to present this section of the Williams profile in full:
“The South has a history of mythmakers, and at the heart of the Southern myth is a love affair with loss. It’s what underlies the myth of the good Southern family; or the notion of the Southern gentleman, of honor and Old World grace and hospitality; or the filthy romance of the Confederate flag; or the sugary fables of Gone with the Wind. These myths — still current, even if anachronistic, even if (like débutante balls and the languid luxury of a south-Georgia accent) always anachronistic — are… offered up as examples of how the South is seen to have retained something that modernizing America no longer has. These were also illustrations of the way people from the North liked to think about the South then, units in the elaborate calculation to compensate for a place that was, when Wilson was writing, still synonymous with defeat and self-righteous pride and a kind of nationalized nationalistic bad judgment. In forty years, the South has changed, but mythmaking remains a habit of mind. I’m not sure that the myths Southerners fashion today are even necessarily that different — less obvious, sometimes subtle to the point of obscurity, but fundamentally founded on the principle that the South has got something that the rest of America doesn’t have anymore. Some of this is in Lucinda Williams’s songs (‘I’m going back to the Crescent City, where everything’s still the same’), although the myths she makes are more sophisticated and of her own private order — it’s a vision in which Jack Kerouac meets Robert Johnson and General Robert E. Lee, and they form a blues band, singing lyrics dashed off by Eudora Welty, and after a blow-out, never-to-be-repeated concert they disappear at dawn on their Harleys, where they all die, driving far too fast, in a terrible accident. Like her Southern accent and her sense of ‘country,’ it’s a vision built on her possession of uniqueness. And it was, I now realize, what drew me to the Delta on my own, and to Rosedale, looking for a juke joint that may no longer exist, and then, afterward, heading down Mississippi State Highway No. 1, the river always on my right, the railroad tracks running parallel somewhere on my left, and the sky big and endless, and nothing else in view, except, every few miles, a white church, an adornment on the flood-flattened Delta horizon, surrounded by cars, having mysteriously drawn a crowd from a land that seemed to have no one on it.”
Frank Stanford wasn’t a river-rat savant, and Lucinda had never seen a juke joint other than in books; for that matter, she’d only met Frank a handful of months before he died. And as for me, I didn’t go to Boogies, the bar the hawk-faced man had warned us about, like how I made it seem I would at the beginning. Instead me and Charlie went through the woodland gardens to the bank of the Ouachita River, where no one could see us, took off our clothes and walked in.