photo courtesy of Chris Compton
Thorne Compton and I met at U of SC in the early sixties. We were on the Junior Varsity, of the Debate Team. We made a mutual friend of Bob Anderson, and did our best to make this first black male student at USC feel welcome. That was an uphill battle in those days. I lost track of Bob after I left grad school in 1965; Thorne kept track and even told me of being in touch with Bob’s widow and child in recent years.
Thorne and I met again in the early seventies. He had done a stint in the Peace Corps with first wife Jo; I had been a hippie mail man in San Francisco, among other West Coast Adventures.
Those adventures led to my pulling together a crew of artists, Viet Nam vets, and singers and seamstresses to open the Joyful Alternative. Thorne was a regular there at our original 2009 Green Street location, stopping in for a record or a book every week, and papers. THE VILLAGE VOICE and GREAT SPECKLED BIRD, that is.
Thorne managed to function in the academic environs better than I had. He earned a doctorate and became an English professor. When I published my first book CHERRY STONES and went to work with the Arts Commission, he invited me to do poetry readings for his classes. He would go on to deanships and department chairs.
I pursued other interests—running a music hall at Folly Beach, getting an MFA in Screenwriting at USC/West. I taught in prisons and on Navy ships, and a planned two-year gig as an adjunct at Moorpark College in California ending up being twenty-five or thirty years.
At one point in the eighties, Thorne got in touch to make sure I got the scoop on Carolina’s big celebration of James Dickey. He got me in, and I was privileged to see and hear such literati as Harold Bloom and John Simon hold forth.
It must have been about that time I began to make an effort to find a full-time teaching job SOMEWHERE, and I made yet another request of the most stolid academic friend I knew for a letter of recommendation.
He must have written a dozen letters, without complaint.
Until I was visiting in Columbia from California in the early nineties and ran into him at the campus bar Hunter-Gatherer. After some catch-up conversation over a beer or three, he blurted out in faux exasperation—I think—“Please don’t ask me to write anymore ________________ letters of recommendation!”
I didn’t.
I spent a few more years adjuncting at Moorpark until I got tired of freeways, and retired to live with my best friend Jo Baker at Pawleys Island. Thorne, having lost his Jo years earlier, was remarried, retired, and removed to Michigan for several years.
The odds were long that two old friends would meet again at the top of the hill where Saluda meets Heyward , but it happened. About two years ago.
I stopped at the sign and waited for a man and his dog, motioning them to go ahead.
Thorne and his dog Bo weren’t taking any chances, so I rolled down the window when Thorne looked closer to check my plans. Two happy old codgers, I guess we seemed to any passersby. And although Bo tugged on the leash and whimpered about having more peemail to check, we caught up a bit. I was on my way home from my work at U of SC School of Nursing, where I occasionally was a Standardized Patient.
He didn’t know the term. I explained I portrayed scenarios of different illness situations, with student nurses. The irony was thick as he managed a smile and said, “I’m the real thing.” He had months, or maybe a couple years, left.
We ended our car window conversation with a promise to get together soon for a nice bottle of red, and lots of “telling lies.”
My personal lethargy, isolation at Pawleys, the pandemic…it didn’t happen. Most of us have made the same mistake.
Thorne’s son Chris Compton messaged me from Los Angeles that if I was going to see him again, it should be sooner rather than later. Thorne’s wife Raven was kind enough to arrange a visit with him the week before Easter.
Even without a good red, we had a very good hour. We talked about Bob Anderson, the early days of Joyful, those letters of recommendation. He smiled and mentioned a memory that surprised me. “Those parties on South Walker Street. Live music and a hundred of your closest friends. Some of the best times I ever had!”
As usual, he asked what I was writing, I told him an artist named Janet Kozachek had provided two pieces of work that had inspired some ekphrastic poems. New as the term was to me, he remembered learning it a dozen years ago. I told him I would send the art and the poems.
I don’t know if he was able to see the stuff before he passed. One of them, with the artwork that inspired it used with the artist’s permission, is printed below. The poem, “Obeisance,” has a puckish tone that I associate with Thorne Compton, and is dedicated to his memory. As is the next glass of red I wrap my hand around.
Artist - Janet Kozachek
OBEISANCE
by Dale Bailes
The posture is apotropaic.
To appease Thanatos, back when.
And now to fend off his vengeful
Sibling, Erinyes.
It is not a conscious thing.
It is brought forth by naked fear
As pandemic stalks the land.
The gesture is archaic, bold.
Bare haunches taunt our oldest
Dread. They show contempt
For knowing time is never
Long enough, nor safety certain.
What I create may have
A longer span. A gesture, small,
To thwart some master plan.
A wrench in the machine.
So. Black-robed, grinning bearer
Of the scythe—or shrieking sister
Eris—bring forth your deadly kiss.
I here present, a target you can’t miss.
Retired English instructor Dale A. Bailes commutes from the ‘hood in Pawleys to the ‘wood in Columbia for his part-time work as a Standardized Patient at the U of SC School of Nursing. He has poems upcoming in Fall Lines and AMERICAN WRITERS REVIEW.