MY OLD FRIEND HUGH

Hugh Merrill died in late December. We were very close friends for a few years in Atlanta in the early 1970s. We worked together at the Atlanta Journal, drank together, ate a great deal of unhealthy food, smoked some dope (pot made him go to sleep peacefully, hashish changed his personality in frightening ways) but beer was our drug of choice and the Stein Club down on Peachtree Street where the hippies came out to play was where we went to drink and talk the way Southern boys full of beer always do – truth and bullshit in equal measures – and there were lots of us around the table almost every afternoon, actors, musicians, other newspaper people and an alcoholic novelist . One of the actors ended up on Dukes of Hazard and I heard the drunken novelist died a few years later sleeping on the bar at Manuel’s Tavern where he mopped up after hours. Hugh knew about many things, but sports was not one of them.

Once he was hitchhiking in Tuscaloosa, got a ride and then was put out on the side of the road when he didn’t recognize the grinning driver. It was Joe Namath (Joe said, “You really don’t know who I am?” Hugh said no. And Joe put him out right there). Hugh was funny – and charming* too, but not everyone thought so – and did the best impersonation of George Wallace I ever heard, even did it for Wallace). We listened to lots of all kinds of music together and fooled around at the edges of rock and roll – including a scary evening spent onstage with the Jefferson Airplane that damaged my hearing and taught us we never wanted to be rock stars (from up there the crowd was terrifying, pressing, undulant, then there was an altercation with the police, settled when singer Marty Balin stopped the show, stepped to the edge of the stage, leaned down and reminded the police there were lots of us and not so many of them) and Hugh’s seduction of an actual singing star (surprised him so much he called me from her bed at a downtown hotel to tell me where he was, who he was with and how his groupie dreams just came true) – and wrote about it sometimes. He was terrible with money in those days. He probably borrowed a lot a little bit at a time, but I never added it up. I didn’t expect to see it again when I gave it to him. And I didn’t. He came from a famous Alabama family of lawyers, judges, politicians and at least one lieutenant governor; I came from a proper North Carolina family, well known in small, mostly local ways, and a busted marriage that their propriety had a difficult time accepting. I figured propriety had a lot to do with Hugh’s relationship with his family too. Neither of us wanted any part of all that. He preferred music, acting and magic tricks to a career in politics or lawyering; I preferred sin and almost anything else to the Presbyterian propriety I grew up around. We both were looking for something, someone, somewhere. What? Who? Where? We didn’t have a clue or a map or a plan. That didn’t stop us. Besides, we had Atlanta. Hugh’s turned out to be a who and he ended up marrying her and I heard he was devastated when she died, but I wasn’t around for that part. Mine turned out to be a where and I was already gone. By then we had lost touch the way friends like us often do. Completely.

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*How charming was he? One night we were driving north from Atlanta to a bluegrass festival somewhere in Virginia. We decided to drop in on my parents in North Carolina. Seemed like a good idea to a couple of guys who had been driving and drinking ever since they left Atlanta. It was nearly midnight, but the lights were still on in the house, so we stopped. We all chatted out by the car in the driveway about this and that and I figured we would be back on the road pretty soon. Then food came up. Hugh got to talking about sawmill gravy and talked about it so lovingly and longingly that my mother went into the house, fried up some fatback for the gravy, made a pan of biscuits to go with it and sat Hugh down in her kitchen and let him eat his fill. He kept her laughing (he did his George Wallace, too) and she kept him eating. We didn’t leave until sometime near dawn. My mother lived until 2006 and from time to time over all those years would remember that night and ask about Hugh, amazed and disappointed when I told her I’d completely lost touch with him long ago.