IS IMPORTANT before I go any further in this military narrative to talk about the teeth of Lee Mellon. They need talking about. During these five years that I have known Lee Mellon, he has probably had 175 teeth in his mouth.
This is due to a truly gifted faculty for getting his teeth knocked out. It almost approaches genius. They say that John Stuart Mill could read Greek when he was three years old and had written a history of Rome at the age of six and a half.
But the amazing thing about Lee Mellon’s teeth is their strange and constantly moving placement in the many and varied dentures those poor teeth briefly get to call home. I would meet him one day on Market Street and he would have just one upper left tooth in his face, and then I’d see him again, months later on Grant Avenue, and he’d have three lower right teeth and one upper right tooth.
I’d see him again just back from Big Sur, and he’d have four upper front teeth, and two lower left teeth, and then after a few weeks in San Francisco, he’d be wearing the upper plate without any teeth in it at all, wearing the plate just so he would have a head start on gristle, and so that his cheeks wouldn’t collapse in on his mouth.
I’ve adjusted to this teeth fantasia always happening to him, and so now everytime I see him, I have a good look at his mouth to see how things are going with him, to see if he has been working, what books he has been reading, whether Sara Teasdale or Mein Kampf, and whom he has been sleeping with: blondes or brunettes.
Lee Mellon told me that once in Modern Times, he’d had all his teeth in his mouth at the same time for a whole day. He was driving a tractor in Kansas, back and forth across a field of wheat, and his brand-new lower plate felt a little funny in his mouth, so he took it out and put it into his shirt pocket. The teeth fell out of his pocket, and he backed the tractor over them.
Lee Mellon told me rather sadly that after he had discovered that the teeth were gone from his shirt pocket, it took him almost an hour to find them, and when he found them, they weren’t worth finding at all.
The First Time I Met Lee Mellon
I MET MELLON five years ago in San Francisco. It was spring. He had just ‘hitch-hiked’ up from Big Sur. Along the way a rich queer stopped and picked Lee Mellon up in a sports car. The rich queer offered Lee Mellon ten dollars to commit an act of oral outrage.
Lee Mellon said all right and they stopped at some lonely place where there were trees leading back into the mountains, joining up with a forest way back in there, and then the forest went over the top of the mountains.
‘After you,’ Lee Mellon said, and they walked back into the trees, the rich queer leading the way. Lee Mellon picked up a rock and bashed the rich queer in the head with it.
‘Ouch!’ the rich queer said and fell on the ground. That hurt, and the rich queer began begging for his life.
‘Spare me! Spare me! I’m just a lonely little rich queer who wanted to have some fun. I never hurt anyone.’
‘Stop blubbering,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘And give me all your money and the keys to your car. That’s all I want anyway, you rich queer.’
The rich queer gave Lee Mellon $235.00 and the keys to his car and his watch.
Lee Mellon hadn’t said anything about the rich queer’s watch, but figuring that his birthday was coming up soon, he’d be twenty-three, Lee Mellon took the watch and put it in his pocket.
The rich queer was having the greatest time of his life. A tall, young, good-looking, dashing, toothless raider was taking all his money and his car and his watch away.
It would make a wonderful story to tell his other rich queer friends. He could show the bump on his head and point to the place where his watch had been.
The rich queer reached up and felt the bump on his head. It was rising like a biscuit. The rich queer hoped the bump wouldn’t go away for a long time.
‘I’m going now,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘And you sit right where you are until tomorrow morning. If you move an inch, I’ll come back here and run over you a couple of times with my car. I’m a desperate man, and I like nothing better in this world than to run over rich queers.’
‘I won’t move until tomorrow morning,’ the rich queer said. This made sense to him. After all Lee Mellon did appear to be quite a mean man, for all his good looks.
‘I won’t move an inch,’ the rich queer promised.
‘That’s a good rich queer,’ Lee Mellon said and abandoned the car in Monterey and took a bus on into San Francisco.
When I met the young raider for the first time, he had been on a four-day drunk with his confiscated funds. He bought a bottle of whiskey and we went into an alley to drink it. Things are done like that in San Francisco.
Lee Mellon and I yakked up a storm and became close friends immediately. He said he was looking for a place to live. He still had some of the rich queer’s money left.
I said that there was a vacant room for rent under the attic where I lived over on Leavenworth Street, and Lee Mellon said, howdy neighbor.
Lee Mellon knew that there was no danger of the rich queer ever going to the police. ‘The rich queer’s probably still sitting down there at Big Sur,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘I hope he doesn’t starve to death.’
Augustus Mellon, CSA
THE FIRST TIME I met Lee Mellon the night went away with every totem drop of the whiskey. When dawn came we were down on the Embarcadero and it was raining. Seagulls started it all, that gray screeching, almost like banners, running with the light. There was a ship going someplace. It was a Norwegian ship.
Perhaps it was going back to Norway, carrying the hides of 163 cable cars, as part of the world commerce deal. Ah, trade: one country exchanging goods with another country, just like in grade school. They traded a rainy spring morning in Oslo for 163 cable car hides from San Francisco.
Lee Mellon looked at the sky. Sometimes when you meet people for the first time, they stare at the sky. He stared for a long time. ‘What?’ I said, because I wanted to be his friend.
‘Just seagulls,’ he said. ‘That one,’ and pointed at a seagull, but I couldn’t tell which one it was for there were many, summoning their voices to the dawn. Then he said nothing for a while.
Yes, one could think of seagulls. We were awfully tired, hung over and still drunk. One could think of seagulls. It’s really a very simple thing to do . . . seagulls: past, present and future passing almost like drums to the sky.
We stopped at a little cafe and got some coffee. The coffee was brought to us by the world’s ugliest waitress. I gave her an imaginary name: Thelma. I do things like that.
My name is Jesse. Any attempt to describe her would be against my better judgment, but in her own way she seemed to belong in that cafe with steam rising like light out of our coffee.
Helen of Troy would have looked out of place. ‘What’s Helen of Troy doing in here?’ some longshoreman would have asked. He wouldn’t have understood. So Thelma it was for the likes of us.
Lee Mellon told me that he was born in Meridian, Mississippi, and grew up in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina. ‘Near Asheville,’
